


All of the Moments of Hugh Apiston

by Callie_Girl



Series: All of the moments of... [4]
Category: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - Ransom Riggs
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, all the moments off
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-04
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:22:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27387133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Callie_Girl/pseuds/Callie_Girl
Summary: Every time they so much as mention Hugh Apiston in the Miss Peregrine series. Why? Who knows!
Relationships: Hugh Apiston/Fiona Frauenfeld
Series: All of the moments of... [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1948549
Kudos: 2





	1. Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children

“Oh, all sorts of ways,” he said. “There was a girl who could fly, a boy who had bees living inside him, a brother and sister who could lift boulders over their heads.”

Other pictures seemed manipulated in much the same way as some of my grandfather’s had been. One was of a lone girl in a cemetery staring into a reɻecting pool—but two girls were reɻected back. It reminded me of Grandpa Portman’s photo of the girl “trapped” in a bottle, only whatever darkroom technique had been used wasn’t nearly as fake-looking. Another was of a disconcertingly calm young man whose upper body appeared to be swarming with bees. That would be easy enough to fake, right? Like my grandfather’s picture of the boy lifting what was certainly a boulder made from plaster. Fake rock—fake bees.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I remembered something Grandpa Portman had said about a boy he’d known here in the children’s home—a boy with bees living inside him. _Some would fly out every time he opened his mouth, he had said, but they never stung unless Hugh wanted them to._

It shouldn’t have surprised me that peculiar children have peculiar eating habits, but between forkfuls of food I found myself sneaking glances around the room. Olive the  
levitating girl had to be belted into a chair screwed to the ɻoor so that she wouldn’t float up to the ceiling. So the rest of us wouldn’t be plagued by insects, Hugh, the boy who had bees living in his stomach, ate under a large mosquito net at a table for one in the corner. Claire, a doll-like girl with immaculate golden curls, sat next to Miss Peregrine but ate not a morsel.

“Aren’t you hungry?” I asked her.

“Claire don’t eat with the rest of us,” Hugh volunteered, a bee escaping from his mouth. “She’s embarrassed.”

“I am not!” she said, glaring at him.

“Yeah? Then eat something ”

“May we go outside and show Jacob?” said Hugh.

“Yes, may we?” Claire begged, suddenly enthused after twenty minutes of sulking. “The changeover is ever so beautiful!”

She pinched me again. While we’d been whispering, Hugh had joined Fiona on stage. He stood with his mouth open, letting bees fly out to pollinate the flowers that Fiona had grown, like a weird mating ritual.

There were a few more acts after Fiona and Hugh left the stage but by then the kids were getting antsy, and soon we dispersed to spend the rest of the day in summery bliss: lazing in the sun sipping limeade; playing croquet; tending to gardens that, thanks to Fiona, hardly needed tending; discussing our options for lunch. I wanted to ask Miss Peregrine more about my grandfather—a subject I avoided with Emma, who turned morose at any mention of his name—but the headmistress had gone to conduct a lesson in the study for the younger kids. It seemed like I had plenty of time, though, and the languid pace and midday heat sapped my will to do anything more taxing than wander the grounds in dreamy amazement.

But Emma persisted. After ten minutes of wheedling she’d roused Hugh, Fiona, and Horace from their naps and challenged Bronwyn, who apparently could not forgo a competition of any kind, to a swimming race. Upon seeing us all trooping out of the house, Millard scolded us for trying to leave him behind.

“It’s Millard who knows everything,” said Hugh.

“It’s true,” said Millard. “In fact, I am in the midst of compiling the world’s first complete account of one day in the life of a town, as experienced by everyone in it. Every action, every conversation, every sound made by each of the one hundred ɹftynine human and three hundred thirty-two animal residents of Cairnholm, minute by minute, sunup to sundown.”

“That’s incredible,” I said.

“I can’t help but agree,” he replied. “In just twenty-seven years I’ve already observed half the animals and nearly all the humans.”

My mouth fell open. “Twenty-seven years?”

“He spent three years on pigs alone!” Hugh said. “That’s all day every day for three years taking notes on pigs! Can you imagine? ‘This one dropped a load of arse biscuits!’ ‘That one said oink-oink and then went to sleep in its own filth!’ ”

“Notes are absolutely essential to the process,” Millard explained patiently. “But I can understand your jealousy, Hugh. It promises to be a work unprecedented in the history of academic scholarship.”

“Ah, but apparently you do! I know this because last night at dinner we were treated by Hugh to a fascinating disquisition on the wonders of twenty-ɹrst-century telecommunications technology.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “Did you know that when you send a letter in the twenty-ɹrst century, it can be received almost instantaneously?”

“I think you’re talking about e-mail.”

“Well, Hugh knew _all_ about it.”

Resuming my mission to find Emma, I learned from Hugh that she was on a supply run to the village, so I settled under a shade tree to wait. Within five minutes I was half asleep in the grass, smiling like a dope, wondering serenely what might be on the menu for lunch. It was as if just being here had some kind of narcotic effect on me; like the loop itself was a drug—a mood enhancer and a sedative combined—and if I stayed too long, I’d never want to leave.

“Sorry I’m late. It took ages for everyone to get to bed! Then on my way out I stumbled over Hugh and Fiona snogging each other’s faces off in the garden. But don’t worry. They promised not to tell if I didn’t.”

We sat talking on the wrecked ship until the moon got low and the water lapped at our throats and Emma began to shiver. Then we linked hands and waded back to the canoe. Paddling toward the beach, we heard voices calling our names, and then we came around a rock and saw Hugh and Fiona waving at us on the shore. Even from a distance, it was clear something was wrong.

We tied the canoe and ran to meet them. Hugh was out of breath, bees darting around him in a state of agitation. “Something’s happened! You’ve got to come back with us!”

There was no time to argue. Emma pulled her clothes over her swimsuit and I tripped into my pants, all gritty with sand. Hugh regarded me uncertainly. “Not him, though,” he said. “This is serious.”

“No, Hugh,” Emma said. “The Bird was right. He’s one of us.”

He gaped at her, then at me. “You told him?!”

“I had to. He’d practically worked it out for himself, anyway.”

Hugh seemed taken aback for a moment but then turned and gave me a resolute handshake. “Then welcome to the family.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just said, “Thanks.”

On the way to the house, we gleaned sketchy bits of information from Hugh about what had happened, but mostly we just ran. When we stopped in the woods to catch our breath, he said, “It’s one of the Bird’s ymbryne friends. She winged in an hour ago in a terrible state, yelling blue murder and rousing everyone from their beds. Before we could understand what she was getting at she fainted dead off.” He wrung his hands, looking miserable. “Oh, I just know something wicked’s happened.”

“I hope you’re wrong,” said Emma, and we ran on.

“Leave them alone!” Hugh shouted, and a squadron of bees sent Horace yelping down the hall.

“What’s going on out there?” Miss Peregrine called from inside the sitting room. “Is that Mr. Apiston I hear? Where are Miss Bloom and Mr. Portman?”

Emma cringed and shot Hugh a nervous look. “She knows?”

“When she found out you were gone, she just about went off her chump. Thought you’d been abducted by wights or some barminess. Sorry, Em. I had to tell her.”

Emma shook her head, but all we could do was go in and face the music. Fiona gave us a little salute—as if to wish us luck—and we opened the doors.

“We’ll need weapons!” cried Millard.

“Battle-axes!” said Enoch.

“Bombs!” said Hugh.

Not surprisingly, the kids began to go a little nuts. The little ones got rambunctious while the older ones moped, complaining about the new rules in voices just loud enough to be overheard. Dramatic sighs erupted out of thin air, often the only cue that Millard had wandered into a room. Hugh’s insects swarmed and stung people until they were banished from the house, after which Hugh spent all his time at the window, his bees screening the other side of the glass.

“You’re alive!” Bronwyn cried. Enoch and Hugh were with her, and when she pulled away they moved in to shake my hand and look me over.

“I’m sorry I called you a traitor,” Enoch said. “I’m glad you’re not dead.”

“Me, too,” I replied.

“All in one piece?” Hugh asked, looking me over.

“Two arms and two legs,” I said, kicking out my limbs to demonstrate their wholeness. “And you won’t have to worry about that hollow anymore. We killed it.”

“Oh, stuff the modesty!” Emma said proudly. “You killed it.”

“That’s brilliant,” Hugh said, but neither he nor the other two could muster a smile.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Wait. Why aren’t you three at the house? Where’s Miss Peregrine?”

“She’s gone,” said Bronwyn, her lip trembling. “Miss Avocet, too. He took them.”

“Oh God,” said Emma. We were too late.

“He come in with a gun,” Hugh said, studying the dirt. “Tried to take Claire hostage, but she chomped him with her backmouth, so he grabbed me instead. I tried to fight, but he knocked me upside the skull with his gun.” He touched the back of his ear and his fingers came away spotted with blood. “Locked everyone in the basement and said if Headmistress and Miss Avocet didn’t change into birds he’d put an extra hole in my head. So they did, and he stuffed ’em both into a cage.”

“He had a cage?” Emma said.

Hugh nodded. “Little one, too, so they didn’t have room to do nothing, like change back or fly off. I reckoned I was good as shot, but then he pushed me down the basement with the others and run off with the birds.”

“That’s how we found ’em when we come in,” Enoch said bitterly. “Hiding down there like a lot of cowards.”

“We wasn’t hiding!” Hugh cried. “He locked us in! He would’ve shot us!”

“Forget that,” snapped Emma. “Where’d he run off to? Why didn’t you go after him?!”

“We don’t know where he went,” said Bronwyn. “We was hoping you’d seen him.”

“No, we haven’t seen him!” Emma said, kicking a cairn stone in frustration. Hugh drew something out of his shirt. It was a little photograph. “He stuʃed this in my pocket before he went. Said if we tried to come after him, this is what would happen.”

Bronwyn snatched the photo from Hugh. “Oh,” she gasped. “Is that Miss Raven?”

“I think it’s Miss Crow,” said Hugh, rubbing his face with his hands.

“That’s it, they’re good as dead,” Enoch moaned. “I knew this day would come!”

“We should never have left the house,” Emma said miserably. “Millard was right.”

At the far edge of the bog a bomb fell, its muted blast followed by a distant rain of excavated glop.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “First of all, we don’t know that this is Miss Crow or Miss Raven. It could just as easily be a picture of a regular crow. And if Golan was going to kill Miss Peregrine and Miss Avocet, why would he go to all the trouble of kidnapping them? If he wanted them dead, they’d be dead already.” I turned to Emma. “And if we hadn’t left, we’d be locked in the basement with everybody else, and there’d still be a hollowgast wandering around!”

“Don’t try to make me feel better!” she said. “It’s your fault this is happening!”

“Ten minutes ago you said you were glad!”

“Ten minutes ago Miss Peregrine wasn’t kidnapped!”

“Will you stop!” said Hugh. “All that matters now is that the Bird’s gone and we’ve got to get her back!”

“Fine, then!” Hugh shouted. “Let’s just give up and go home then, shall we? Who’d like a nice hot cup of tea before bed? Hell, as long as the Bird ain’t around, make it a toddy!” He was crying, wiping angrily at his eyes. “How can you not even try, after all she’s done for us?”

Before Enoch could answer, we heard a voice calling us from the path. Hugh stepped forward, squinting, and after a moment his face went strange. “It’s Fiona,” he said. Before that moment I’d never heard Fiona utter so much as a peep. It was impossible to make out what she was saying over the sound of planes and distant concussions, so we took off running across the bog.

When we got to the path, we were breathing hard and Fiona was hoarse from shouting, her eyes as wild as her hair. Immediately she began to pull at us, to drag and push us down the path toward town, yelling so frantically in her thick Irish accent that none of us could understand. Hugh caught her by the shoulders and told her to slow down.

“You did it!” Hugh shouted.

After a minute, Hugh snuck a peek and said, “Nope, still a bird.”

“Then Miss Avocet’s as good as dead,” said Hugh. “They’ll kill her for sure.”

“Maybe not,” I replied. “At least not right away.”

“If there’s one thing I know about wights,” said Enoch, “it’s that they kill peculiars. It’s their nature. It’s what they do.”

“No, Jacob’s right,” said Emma. “Before that wight died, he told us why they’ve been abducting so many ymbrynes. They’re going to force them to re-create the reaction that made the hollows in the first place—only bigger. Much bigger.”

I heard someone gasp. Everyone else fell silent. I looked around for Miss Peregrineand saw her perched forlornly on the edge of Adam’s crater.

“We’ve got to stop them,” Hugh said. “We’ve got to find out where they’re taking the ymbrynes.”

“But what if all the other loops have slipped too?” said Hugh. “What if all the ymbrynes have already been kidnapped?”

“We can’t think that way. There must be some left.”

Hugh and I rowed the first boat. Enoch sat watching us from the bow, ready to take his turn, while Emma in a sunhat studied the receding island. The sea was a pane of rippled glass spreading endlessly before us. The day was warm, but a cool breeze came oʃ the water, and I could’ve happily rowed for hours. I wondered how such calm could belong to a world at war.


	2. Hollow City

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For some reason, my computer is replacing fi with "ɹ," ff with "ʃ," and fl with "ɻ," I tried to fix all of them, but some may have slipped through.

HUGH APISTON-  A boy who commands and protects the many bees that live in his stomach.

Our boats slid easily through the waves, three abreast, a friendly current bearing us coastward. We rowed in shifts, taking turns at the oars to stave oʃ exhaustion, though I felt so strong that for nearly an hour I refused to give them up. I lost myself in the rhythm of the strokes, my arms tracing long ellipses in the air as if pulling something toward me that refused to come. Hugh manned the oars opposite me, and behind him, atthe bow, sat Emma, her eyes hidden beneath the brim of a sun hat, head bent toward a map spread across her knees. Every so often she’d look up from her map to consult the horizon, and just the sight of her face in the sun gave me energy I didn’t know I had.

Bronwyn, seemingly inexhaustible, rowed one of the boats all by herself. Olive sat opposite but was no help; the tiny girl couldn’t pull the oars without pushing herself up into the air, where a stray gust of wind might send her ɻying away like a kite. So Olive shouted encouragement while Bronwyn did the work of two—or three or four, if you took into account all the suitcases and boxes weighing down their boat, stuʃed with clothes and food and maps and books and a lot of less practical things, too, like several jars of pickled reptile hearts sloshing in Enoch’s duʃel bag; or the blown-oʃ front doorknob to Miss Peregrine’s house, a memento Hugh had found in the grass on our way to the boats and decided he couldn’t live without; or the bulky pillow Horace had rescued from the house’s ɻaming shell—it was his lucky pillow, he said, and the only thing that kept his paralyzing nightmares at bay.

“Farewell, island,” said Hugh. “You were so good to us.”

A wall of water plowed straight toward us. We climbed the massive wave, our boats turning nearly vertical beneath us. Emma clung to me and I clung to the oarlock; behind us Hugh held on to the seat with his arms. We crested the wave like a roller coaster, my stomach dropping into my legs, and as we raced down the far side, everything in our boat that wasn’t nailed down—Emma’s map, Hugh’s bag, the red roller suitcase I’d lugged with me since Florida—went flying out over our heads and into the water.

“We have to get closer!” Hugh shouted, and forgetting our exhaustion we grabbed the oars and paddled toward it, calling their names into the wind.

“And without water,” said Hugh.

“If you mean could they be wights,” said Hugh, “don’t be daft. The wights are with the Germans. They’re on that German sub.”

“The wights are allied with whomever it suits their interests to be allied with,” Millard said. “There’s no reason to think they haven’t inɹltrated organizations on both sides of the war.”

“And if the wights should spot us from the air?” said Hugh.

“They won’t. We’ll be careful.”

Hugh coughed, and bees tumbled out of his mouth to form a question mark that shivered in the air. “How can you be so bloody sure?” he asked.

“Not since Abe,” Hugh said, and at the mention of his name a reverent hush fell over the children.

“Nonsense,” said Emma. “You’ll be every bit the hollow-slayer Abe was, one day.”

“One day soon, let’s hope,” said Hugh.

“It’s your destiny,” said Horace, and the way he said it made me think he knew something I didn’t.

“And even if it ain’t,” said Hugh, clapping his hand on my back, “you’re all we’ve got, mate.”

We gathered cuts of springy moss to use as pillows, Emma drying the rain from them with her hands before we tucked them under our heads. Lacking blankets, we nestled together for warmth: Bronwyn cuddling the small ones; Fiona entangled with Hugh, whose bees came and went from his open mouth as he snored, keeping watch over their sleeping master; Horace and Enoch shivering with their backs to one another, too proud to snuggle; myself with Emma. I lay on my back and she in the crook of my arm, head on my chest, her face so invitingly close to mine that I could kiss her forehead anytime I liked—and I wouldn’t have stopped except that I was as tired as a dead man and she was as warm as an electric blanket and pretty soon I was asleep and dreaming pleasant, forgettable nothings.

We ɹnished quickly, buried our empty tins, and prepared to go. Just as we were about to, Hugh burst through a thicket of bushes into our makeshift camp, bees circling his head in an agitated cloud. He was out of breath with excitement.

“Where have you been?” Enoch demanded.

“I needed some privacy to attend to my morning never-you-minds,” Hugh said, “and I found—”

“Who gave you permission to be out of visual range?” Enoch said. “We nearly left without you!”

“Who says I need permission? Anyway, I saw—”

“You can’t just wander away like that! What if you’d gotten lost?”

“We’re already lost.”

“You ignoramus! What if you couldn’t find your way back?”

“I left a trail of bees, like I always do—”

“Would you kindly let him finish!” Emma shouted.

“Thank you,” said Hugh, and then he turned and pointed back the way he’d come. “I saw water. Quite a lot of it, through the trees there.”

Emma’s face clouded. She said, “We’re trying to get away from the sea, not back to it. We must’ve doubled back on ourselves in the night.”

We followed Hugh back the way he’d come, Bronwyn carrying Miss Peregrine on her shoulder and poor sick Claire in her arms. After a hundred yards, a glisten of gray ripples appeared beyond the trees: some wide body of water.

“Everything makes you anxious,” Hugh said.

“But what is this loop?” asked Hugh. “Who do you think lives here?”

I lied and said I was, and succeeded in faking allrightness for exactly three more twists in the path, at which point my heart was racing and my legs shaking so badly that I had to sit down, right there in the middle of the narrow path, blocking everyone behind me.

“Oh, dear,” Hugh muttered. “Jacob’s cracking up.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I muttered. I’d never been afraid of heights before, but now I couldn’t so much as look oʃ the edge of the path without my stomach doing flips.

Panic took hold. Miss Peregrine began to screech and Claire to cry as Horace stood and wailed, “This is the end, we’re all going to die!” The rest looked for last-ditch ways to save ourselves. Fiona dragged her hands along the wall, searching for crevices that might contain soil from which she could grow a vine or something else we could climb. Hugh ran to the edge of the path and peered over the drop-oʃ. “We could jump, if only we had a parachute!”

“And don’t forget about my bees!” said Hugh, opening his mouth to let them out. “They can be fierce when provoked!”

Enoch, who always found a way to laugh at the most inappropriate times, let out a big guffaw. “What’re you going to do,” he said, “pollinate it to death?”

Hugh ignored him, turning to me instead. “You’ll be our eyes, Jacob. Just tell us where the beast is and we’ll sting his brains out!”

Bronwyn threw her arms around me. Emma kissed the top of my head. Horace shook my hand and Hugh slapped me on the back. Even Enoch congratulated me. “Good work,” he said a bit reluctantly. “Now don’t go getting a big head over it.”

“A place to launch airplanes from?” said Hugh.

But there were no airplanes anywhere, nor any evidence of a landing strip.

“Perhaps it’s a place to launch zeppelins from,” said Millard.

I remembered old footage of the ill-fated Hindenburg docking to the top of what looked like a radio tower—a structure not so different from this—and felt a cold wave of dread pass through me. What if the balloons that hunted us on the beach were based here, and we’d unwittingly stumbled into a nest of wights?

“Or maybe it’s the ymbryne’s house,” said Olive. “Why does everyone always leap to the awfullest conclusions right away?”

“I’m sure Olive’s right,” said Hugh. “There’s nothing to be afraid of here.”

He was answered right away by a loud, inhuman growl, which seemed to come from the shadows beneath the tower.

“We don’t know that,” said Hugh. “That London is their doorstep.”

“Fee, you can’t!” said Hugh. He looked hurt, as if by volunteering to stay behind she was rejecting him. She looked at him with big, sad eyes, but her hand stayed in the air.

Hugh and Fiona stood oʃ to one side, their hands linked and foreheads touching, saying goodbye in their own quiet way. Finally, we’d all finished with Claire and were ready to go, but no one wanted to disturb them, so we stood watching as Fiona pulled away from Hugh, shook a few seeds from her nest of wild hair, and grew a rose bush heavy with red flowers right where they stood. Hugh’s bees rushed to pollinate it, and while they were occupied—as if she’d done it just so they could have a moment to themselves—Fiona embraced him and whispered something in his ear, and Hugh nodded and whispered something back. When they finally turned and saw all of us looking, Fiona blushed, and Hugh came toward us with his hands jammed in his pockets, his bees trailing behind him, and growled, “Let’s go, show’s over.”

“I’ll throw an exploding egg at the ɹrst dog that gets near us,” said Hugh. “That’ll teach them to chase peculiars.”

“Don’t you dare,” said Bronwyn. “Mishandle one egg and you’re liable to set them all off!”

I got down from the wagon like the man had asked, hands above my head. Horace and Hugh did the same, and then the others—all but Millard, who had slipped away, unseen, presumably to lurk nearby, waiting and watching.

“One of us is ill,” said Emma, shooting Hugh a meaningful look. “We need to get him a doctor!”

“You don’t need to go all the way to London for no doctor,” said one of the Gypsy men. “Jebbiah’s a doctor. Ain’t you, Jebbiah?”

A man with scabrous lesions spanning his cheeks stepped forward. “Which one of ye’s ill?”

“Hugh needs a specialist,” said Emma. “He’s got a rare condition. Stinging cough.”

Hugh put a hand to his throat as if it hurt him and coughed, and a bee shot out of his mouth. Some of the Gypsies gasped, and a little girl hid her face in her mother’s skirt.

“It’s some sort of trick!” said the so-called doctor.

“Enough,” said their leader. “Get in the cage, all of you.”

They shoved us toward a ramp that led to it. We clustered together at the bottom. No one wanted to go first.

“We can’t let them do this!” whispered Hugh

Hugh snorted. “We would’ve been killed ages ago if you were in charge.”

The minutes crawled by. Then a half hour. Then an hour. Hugh paced the length of the cage, an agitated bee circling his head.

“What’s taking him so long?” he grumbled.

“If he doesn’t come back soon, I’m going to start tossing eggs,” said Enoch.

“Who?” I said, and then he nodded at Hugh, who wilted to the floor in spasms of coughing, right on cue.

It was time to put on a show. Bronwyn went ɹrst: with one hand she raised the boy even higher, his feet kicking in the air, and with the other she grabbed one of the roof bars and began to bend it. Hugh stuck his face between the bars and shot a line of bees from his open mouth, and then Millard, who’d sprinted away from the cage the moment the boy had noticed him, shouted from somewhere behind the crowd, “And if you think you can contend with them, you haven’t met me!” and launched an egg into the air. It arced above their heads and landed in a nearby clearing with a huge bang, scattering dirt as high as the treetops.

From the corner of my eye I saw Hugh rise from the hay and crawl to Bronwyn’s trunk. He slipped his ɹngers over the latch and began to open the lid, but Bronwyn stopped him. “What are you doing?” she mouthed.

“We’ve got to get them before they get us!”

Emma lifted herself out of the hay on her elbows and rolled toward them, and I got closer too, to listen.

“Don’t be insane,” said Emma. “If we throw the eggs now, they’ll shoot us to ribbons.”

“So what, then?” said Hugh. “We should just lie here until they find us?”

We clustered around the trunk, speaking in whispers.

“Wait until they unlock the door,” said Enoch. “Then I’ll throw an egg through the bars behind us. That’ll distract the wights long enough for Bronwyn to crack the skull of whichever one comes into the cage first, which should give the rest of us time to run. Scatter to the outer edges of camp, then turn and throw your eggs back at the middlemost campfire. Everyone in a thirty-meter radius will be a memory.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Hugh. “That just might work.”

“But there are children in the camp!” said Bronwyn.

Enoch rolled his eyes. “Or we can worry about collateral damage, run into the woods, and leave the wights and their dogs to hunt us down one by one. But if we plan on reaching London—or living beyond tonight—I don’t recommend it.”

Hugh patted Bronwyn’s hand, which was covering the trunk latch. “Open it,” he said. “Give them out.”

“You always have a choice,” said Bronwyn.

Then we heard a dog snarl very near the bottom rim of the cage, and went silent. A moment later a ɻashlight shone against the outside of the tarp. “Tear this sheet down!” someone said—the dog’s handler, I assumed.

The dog barked, its nose snuʀing to get beneath the tarp and up through the cage bars. “Over here!” shouted the handler. “We’ve got something!”

We all looked to Bronwyn. “Please,” Hugh said. “At least let us defend ourselves.”

“It’s the only way,” said Enoch.

Bronwyn sighed and took her hand away from the latch. Hugh nodded gratefully and opened the trunk lid. We all reached in and took an egg from between the layered sweaters—everyone but Bronwyn. Then we stood and faced the cage door, eggs in hand, and prepared for the inevitable.

“For your sick friend?” Bekhir asked, raising an eyebrow at Hugh, who had long ago dropped his act and was now gulping down stew with abandon, bees buzzing happily around his head.

Before anyone could stop him, he’d sent his pants to his ankles. The girls gasped and looked away. Hugh shouted, “Keep your trousers on, you depraved lunatic!”

_Hugh_ , I thought. _What’s he up to?_ I looked for him in line, worried he might be planning something that would get us all shot—but I didn’t see him. I did a quick head count. One-two-three-four-five-six. In front of me was Emma, then Enoch, Horace, Olive, Millard, and Bronwyn.

Where was Hugh?

I nearly leapt into the air. Hugh wasn’t here! That meant he hadn’t been rounded up with the rest of us. He was still free! Maybe in the chaos at the depot he’d slipped down into the gap between the train and the platform, or hopped onto the train without the soldier noticing. I wondered if he was following us—wished I could look back at the road behind without giving him away.

I hoped he wasn’t, because that might mean he was with Miss Peregrine. Otherwise, how would we ever find her again? And what if she ran out of air, locked in that trunk? And what did they do with suspiciously abandoned baggage in 1940, anyway?

And now they were going to waste us. Lead us to some killing field where we’d be interrogated and dumped. And if Hugh had been dumb enough to follow us—if the bee flying up and down our line meant he was nearby—then they’d kill him, too.

Brown opened his mouth and tried to speak—but where his voice should’ve been, an eerie droning noise came echoing up from his guts, mimicking the sound that was everywhere in the fields around him.

It was the sound of bees. Hundreds, thousands of them. Next came the bees themselves: just a few at ɹrst, drifting through his parted lips. Then some power beyond his own seemed to take hold of him: his shoulders pulled back and his chest pressed forward and his jaws ratcheted wide open, and from his gaping mouth there poured forth such a dense stream of bees that they were like one solid object; a long, fat hose of insects unspooling endlessly from his throat.

Mr. White stumbled back from the window, horrified and baffled.

Out in the field, Brown collapsed in a cloud of stinging insects. As his body fell, another was revealed behind him.

It was a boy.

Hugh.

He stood defiantly, staring through the window. The insects swung around him in a great, whirling sphere. The ɹelds were packed with them—honeybees and hornets, wasps and yellow jackets, stinging things I couldn’t know or name—and every last one of them seemed to be at his command.

Mr. White raised his gun and fired. Emptied his clip.

Hugh went down, disappearing in the grass. I didn’t know whether he had fallen to the ground or dived to it. Then three other soldiers ran to the window, and while Bronwyn cried “Please, don’t kill him!” they raked the field with bullets, filling our ears with the thunder of their guns.

Then there were bees in the room. A dozen, maybe, furious and flinging themselves at the soldiers.

“Shut the window!” Mr. White screamed, swatting the air around him.

A soldier slammed the window closed. They all went to work smacking the bees that had gotten in. While they were busy with that, more and more collected outside—a giant, seething blanket of them pulsing against the other side of the glass—so many that by the time Mr. White and his men had ɹnished killing the bees inside the room, the ones outside had nearly shut out the sun.

The soldiers clustered in the middle of the ɻoor, backs together, rifles bristling out like porcupine quills. It was dark and hot, and the alien whine of a million manic bees reverberated through the room like something out of a nightmare.

“Make them leave us alone!” Mr. White shouted, his voice cracking, desperate.

As if anyone but Hugh could do that—if he was still alive.

“I’ll make you another offer,” said Bekhir, pulling himself to his feet using the window bars, his hobbled silhouette outlined against the dark glass. “Put down your guns or I open this window.”

Mr. White spun to face him. “Even a Gypsy wouldn’t be stupid enough to do that.”

“You think too highly of us,” Bekhir said, sliding his fingers toward the handle.

The soldiers raised their rifles.

“Go ahead,” said Bekhir. “Shoot.”

“Don’t, you’ll break the glass!” Mr. White shouted. “Grab him!”

Two soldiers threw down their riɻes and lunged at Bekhir, but not before he punched his fist through the glass.

The entire window shattered. Bees flushed into the room. Chaos erupted—screams, gunfire, shoving—though I could hardly hear it over the roar of the insects, which seemed to fill not just my ears but every pore of my body.

People were climbing over one another to get out. To my right I saw Bronwyn push Olive to the floor and cover her with her body. Emma shouted “Get down!” and we ducked for cover as bees tumbled over our skin, our hair. I waited to die, for the bees to cover every exposed inch of me in stings that would shut down my nervous system. Someone kicked open the door. Light blasted in. A dozen boots thundered across the floorboards.

It got quiet. I slowly uncovered my head.

The bees were gone. So were the soldiers.

Then, from outside, a chorus of panicked screams. I jumped up and rushed to the shattered window, where a knot of Gypsies and peculiars were already gathered, peering out.

At first I didn’t see the soldiers at all—just a giant, swirling mass of insects, so dense it was opaque, about fifty feet down the footpath.

The screams were coming from inside it.

Then, one by one, the screamers fell silent. When it was all over, the cloud of bees began to spread and scatter, unveiling the bodies of Mr. White and his men. They lay clustered in the low grass, dead or nearly so.

Twenty seconds later, their killers were gone, their monstrous hum fading as they settled back into the ɹelds. In their wake fell a strange and bucolic calm, as if it were just another summer day, and nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

Emma counted the soldiers’ bodies on her fingers. “Six. That’s all of them,” she said. “It’s over.”

I put my arms around her, shaking with gratitude and disbelief.

“Which of you are hurt?” said Bronwyn, looking around frantically. Those last moments had been crazy—countless bees, gunɹre in the dark. We checked ourselves for holes. Horace was dazed but conscious, a trickle of blood running from his temple. Bekhir’s stab wound was deep but would heal. The rest of us were shaken but unhurt—and miraculously, not a single one of us was bee-stung.

“When you broke the window,” I said to Bekhir, “how did you know the bees wouldn’t attack us?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “Luckily, your friend’s power is strong.”

Our friend …

Emma pulled away from me suddenly. “Oh my God!” she gasped. “Hugh!”

In all the chaos, we’d forgotten about him. He was probably bleeding to death right now, somewhere in the tall grass. But just as we were about to tear outside and look for him, he appeared in the doorway—bedraggled and grass-stained, but smiling.

“Hugh!” Olive cried, rushing to him. “You’re alive!”

“I am!” he said heartily. “Are all of you?”

“Thanks to you we are!” Bronwyn said. “Three cheers for Hugh!”

“You’re our man in a pinch, Hugh!” cried Horace.

“Nowhere am I deadlier than in a field of wildflowers,” Hugh said, enjoying the attention.

“Sorry about all the times I made fun of your peculiarity,” said Enoch. “I suppose it’s not so useless.”

“Additionally,” said Millard, “I’d like to compliment Hugh on his impeccable timing. Really, if you’d arrived just a few seconds later …”

Hugh explained how he’d evaded capture at the depot by slipping down between the train and the platform—just like I’d thought. He’d sent one of his bees trailing after us, which allowed him to follow from a careful distance. “Then it was just a matter of finding the perfect time to strike,” he said proudly, as if victory had been assured from the moment he decided to save us.

“And if you hadn’t accidentally stumbled across a field packed with bees?” Enoch said.

Hugh dug something from his pocket and held it up: a peculiar chicken egg. “Plan B,” he said.

Bekhir hobbled to Hugh and shook his hand. “Young man,” he said, “we owe you our lives.”

“What about your peculiar boy?” Millard asked Bekhir.

“He managed to escape with two of my men, thank God. We lost three ɹne animals today, but no people.” Bekhir bowed to Hugh, and I thought for a moment he might even take Hugh’s hand and kiss it. “You must allow us to repay you!”

Hugh blushed. “There’s no need, I assure you—”

“And no time, either,” said Emma, pushing Hugh out the door. “We have a train to catch!”

Horace’s dreams had started when he was just six, but he didn’t realize they were predictive of anything until two years later, when one night he dreamed about the sinking of the Lusitania and the next day heard about it on the radio. Hugh, from a young age, had loved honey more than any other food, and at ɹve he’d started eating honeycomb along with it—so ravenously that the first time he accidentally swallowed a bee, he didn’t notice until he felt it buzzing around in his stomach. “The bee didn’t seem to mind a bit,” Hugh said, “so I shrugged and went on eating. Pretty soon I had a whole hive down there.” When the bees needed to pollinate, he’d gone to find a field of blooming flowers, and that’s where he met Fiona, who was sleeping among them.

Hugh told her story, too. Fiona was a refugee from Ireland, he said, where she’d been growing food for the people in her village during the famine of the 1840s—until she was accused of being a witch and chased out. This is something Hugh had gleaned only after years of subtle, nonverbal communication with Fiona, who didn’t speak not because she couldn’t, Hugh said, but “because the things she’d witnessed in the famine were so horrific they stole her voice away.”

“We killed every one of them that might’ve known where we were going,” Hugh said proudly. “Or rather, I did.”

On an ordinary day, any group of children as lost and forlorn-looking as these would’ve been approached by some kindly adult and asked what the matter was, or whether they needed help, or where their parents were. But today the platform teemed with hundreds of children, all of whom looked lost and forlorn. So no one paid much attention to the little girl with tumbling brown hair and button shoes, or the fact that her shoes did not quite touch the floor. No one noticed the moon-faced boy in the ɻat cap, or the honeybee that drifted from his mouth, tested the sooty air, then dove back from whence it came.

“Who are we calling?” Hugh asked.

“The peculiar dog said that all of London’s loops had been raided and their ymbrynes kidnapped,” Emma said, “but we can’t simply take his word for it, can we?”

“We just got off one,” said Hugh. “We ain’t about to get on another!”

“And what have you done with your tag numbers?” the man shouted, flecks of spittle flying from his lips. “Produce them at once or by God I’ll have you shipped somewhere a great deal less pleasant than Wales!”

“Someone do something!” Brownyn cried. We all knew what she meant, but it wasn’t clear which of us was free to act. Then a bee whizzed past Enoch’s nose and buried its stinger in the haunches of the woman sitting astride him, and she squealed and leapt up.

“Yes!” Enoch shouted. “More bees!”

“They’re tired!” Hugh shouted back. “They only just got to sleep after saving you the last time!” But he could see that there was no other way—Emma’s arms were pinned, Bronwyn was busy protecting both her trunk and Olive from a trio of angry train conductors, and there were more adults on the way—so Hugh began pounding his chest as if trying to dislodge a piece of stuck food. A moment later he let out a reverberating belch, and ten or so bees flew out of his mouth. They did a few circles overhead, then got their bearings and began stinging every adult in sight.

The men holding Emma dropped her and ɻed. The one holding me got stung right on the tip of his nose, and he hollered and ɻapped his arms as if possessed by demons. Soon all the adults were running, trying to defend themselves from tiny, stinging attackers with spastic dance moves, to the delight of all the children still on the platform, who laughed and cheered and threw their arms in the air in imitation of their ridiculous elders.

With everyone thus distracted, we picked ourselves up, bolted for the turnstiles, and ran out into a bustling London afternoon.

I glanced at Hugh, expecting him to chime in, but his back was to us, his shoulders trembling.

“Hugh?” I said. “You all right?”

He shied away. “No one gives a whit,” he said. “Don’t bother checking on old Hugh, he’s just here to save everyone’s hindquarters with no word of thanks from anybody!” Shamed, we offered him our thanks and apologies.

“Sorry, Hugh.”

“Thanks again, Hugh.”

“You’re our man in a pinch, Hugh.”

He turned to face us. “They were my friends, you know.”

“We still are!” said Olive.

“Not you—my bees! They can only sting once, and then it’s lights out, the big hive in the sky. And now I’ve only Henry left, and he can’t ɻy ’cause he’s missing a wing.” He put out his hand and slowly opened the ɹngers, and there in his palm was Henry, waving his only wing at us.

“C’mon, mate,” Hugh whispered to it. “Time to go home.” He stuck out his tongue, set the bee upon it, and closed his mouth.

Enoch patted him on the shoulder. “I’d bring them back to life for you, but I’m not sure it would work on creatures so small.”

“Thanks anyway,” Hugh said, and then he cleared his throat and wiped his cheeks roughly, as if annoyed at his tears for exposing him.

“We’ll find you more just as soon as we get Miss P fixed up,” said Bronwyn.

It was a pyramid of heads. They were blackened and caved, mouths agape, eyes boiled shut, melted and pooled together in the gutter like some hydra-headed horror. Then Emma came to see and gasped and turned away; Bronwyn came and started moaning; Hugh gagged and clapped his hands over his eyes; and then finally Enoch, who seemed not in the least disturbed, calmly nudged one of the heads with his shoe and pointed out that they were only mannequins made of wax, having spilled from the display window of a bombed wig shop. We all felt a little ridiculous but somehow no less horriɹed, because even though the heads weren’t real, they represented something that was, hidden beneath the rubble around us.

Our hunt began in a square close to the cathedral, where old men on benches were feeding pigeons. At ɹrst it was mayhem: we bounded in, grabbing wildly as the pigeons took off. The old men grumbled, and we withdrew to wait for their return. They did, eventually, pigeons not being the smartest animals on the planet, at which point we all took turns wading casually into the flock and trying to catch them by surprise, reaching down to snatch at them. I thought Olive, who was small and quick, or Hugh, with his peculiar connection to another sort of winged creature, might have some luck, but both were humiliated. Millard didn’t fare any better, and they couldn’t even see him. By the time my turn came, the pigeons must’ve been sick of us bothering them, because the moment I strolled into the square they all burst into flight and took one big, simultaneous cluster-bomb crap, which sent me flailing toward a water fountain to wash my whole head.

“I don’t see anything,” Horace complained. “There are enough hiding places here for ten thousand pigeons!”

“Don’t look,” Hugh said. “Listen.”

“What is this place?” Hugh whispered.

“Graveyard overɻow,” said Enoch. “When they need to make room for new customers, they dig up the old ones and stick them down here.”

Then Hugh and Horace pressed their faces through the doorway, curious to see whom we’d met, and Olive scooted between their legs and sat in the middle of the floor, and pretty soon all of us were squeezed into the bathroom together, even Melina and the blind brothers, who stood creepily facing the corner. Seeing so many people, Sam’s legs shook and she sat down heavily on the toilet, overwhelmed—but her sister was thrilled, asking everyone’s name as they came in.

I sat up slowly and looked around. I couldn’t see much through the dust, but I heard my friends calling out for one another. There was Horace’s voice, and Bronwyn’s. Hugh’s. Millard’s.

Hugh said, “Your shirt, mate,” then went to Enoch and plucked a crumpled nail from the back of his grit-encrusted sweater.

“And yours,” said Enoch, pulling a jagged spike of metal from Hugh’s.

Bronwyn went after her. She climbed a crumbling staircase to the ruined ceiling, then reached out to grab onto the beam. She pulled and pulled, and with her great strength was able to angle the beam downward until the broken end was nearly touching the rubble below. This allowed Enoch and Hugh to reach Sam’s dangling legs and, very gently, slide her forward until she came free with a soft ploop! and landed on her feet.

“Hm,” said Hugh, nudging the fallen man with his foot. “You’d think these chaps would be made of tougher stuff.”

Hugh’s cap had blown oʃ his head and been crushed. He went to pick it up, found it shredded, and threw it down again angrily. “I don’t care for this loop,” he said. “We’ve been here all of ten seconds and already it’s trying to kill us. Let’s do what we have to and get gone.”

“Why would anyone know your birthday?” said Hugh.

Enoch frowned. “Just try it.”

“Oh my bird, she’s killed it!” cried Bronwyn.

“All we went through to catch that thing,” said Hugh, “and now look.”

“I’m going to stomp your ymbryne’s head!” Melina shrieked, crazed with rage.

Bronwyn caught her arms again. “No, you’re not! Stop it!”

“Your ymbryne’s a savage! If that’s how she conducts herself, we’re better off with the wights!”

“You take that back!” shouted Hugh.

“I won’t!” Melina said.

More harsh words were exchanged. A fistfight was narrowly avoided. Bronwyn held Melina, and Emma and I held Hugh, until the fight went out of them, if not the bitterness.

“She’s changing,” said Hugh. “Becoming more animal.”

“Because it seems we’re going to a carnival,” said Hugh, looking up at a poster on the wall that advertised one.

“Just a moment!” Horace said, joining Hugh beneath the poster. “I’ve heard of this place! It’s an old tourist loop.”

“That was mysterious,” said Hugh.

“Did he say peculiar?” said Bronwyn.

“I knew you were peculiar the second I saw you,” said the folding man. “How you weren’t captured long time ago?”

“Because we’re wily,” said Hugh.

“He means lucky,” I said.

“We were captured,” Hugh said proudly, “but the wights who took us didn’t live to tell about it.”

“Uh-huh, and I’m the king of Bolivia,” the clown said.

“It’s true!” Hugh thundered, going red in the face.

The clown tossed up his hands. “Okay, okay, calm down, kid! I’m sure Wren wouldn’t have let you in if you weren’t legitimate. Come on, let’s be friends, have a turkey leg.”

Hugh stood at the foot of the whispering man’s bed, his last bee buzzing angrily around him. “All the peculiar children they kidnapped over the years … this is what they were doing to them? I ɹgured they just became hollowgast food. But this … this is leagues more evil.”

“I think we should ɹght,” said Hugh. “Now that we know what the wights are doing to us, I couldn’t live with myself if we just went back to the way things were, and tried to pretend none of this was happening. To fight is the only honorable thing.”

“Miss Peregrine knows best!” cheered Olive.

“Miss Peregrine knows best!” echoed Hugh.

“I don’t care what Miss Peregrine says,” said Horace. “I’ll fight.”

Enoch choked back a laugh. “You?”

“Everyone thinks I’m a coward. This is my chance to prove them wrong.”

“Don’t throw your life away because of a few jokes made at your expense,” said Hugh. “Who gives a whit what anyone else thinks?”

And then Hugh turned to me and said, “What about you, Jacob?” and my mouth went instantly dry.

“Thank the gods,” said Horace.

“Thank the birds,” said Hugh.

“Thank the gods and the birds,” said Bronwyn. “All the birds in all the trees in all the forests.”

For such a frail old lady, Miss Wren was giving Miss Peregrine a pretty good clobbering. But then the bird jabbed at Miss Wren with her beak and Miss Wren’s grasp slipped, and with a big flap of her wings Miss Peregrine nearly escaped from her hands. The children reacted with shouts and gasps. But Miss Wren was quick, and she leapt up and managed to catch Miss Peregrine by her hind leg and thump her down against the floorboards again, which made the children gasp even louder. We weren’t used to seeing our ymbryne treated like this, and Bronwyn actually had to stop Hugh from rushing into the fight to protect her.


	3. Library of Souls

The others. I could see them still, their afterimage fading by the tracks: Horace’s fine clothes a mess; Bronwyn’s strength no match for the wights’ guns; Enoch dizzy from the blast; Hugh using the chaos to pull off Olive’s heavy shoes and float her away; Olive caught by the heel and yanked down before she could rise out of reach. All of them weeping in terror, kicked onto the train at gunpoint, gone. Gone with the ymbryne we’d nearly killed ourselves to find, hurtling now through London’s guts toward a fate worse than death. It’s already too late, I thought. It was too late the moment Caul’s soldiers stormed Miss Wren’s frozen hideout. It was too late the night we mistook Miss Peregrine’s wicked brother for our beloved ymbryne. But I swore to myself that we’d find our friends and our ymbryne, no matter the cost, even if there were only bodies to recover—even if it meant adding our own to the pile.

And then we turned and saw, pressed against the bars of the cells lining the hall, the faces of our friends. There they were: Horace and Enoch, Hugh and Claire, Olive, gasping through the bars at us from the top of her cell, her back against the ceiling—all there, all of them breathing and alive, except poor Fiona—lost when she fell from the cliff at Miss Wren’s menagerie. But mourning her was a luxury we didn’t have right then.

“Oh, thank the birds, the miraculous bloody birds!” Emma cried, running to take Olive’s hand. “You can’t imagine how worried we’ve been!”

“Not half as worried as we’ve been!” Hugh said from down the hall.

“I told them you’d come for us!” Olive said, near tears. “I told them and told them, but Enoch kept saying I was a loony for thinking so …”

“Never mind, they’re here now!” said Enoch. “What took you so bloody long?”

“How in Perplexus’s name did you find us?” said Millard. He was the only one the wights had bothered to dress in prisoners’ garb—a striped jumpsuit that made him easy to see.

“We’ll tell you the whole story,” said Emma, “but first we need to find the ymbrynes and get you all out of here!”

“They’re down the hall!” said Hugh. “Through the big door!”

At the end of the hall was a huge metal door. It looked heavy enough to secure a bank vault—or hold back a hollowgast.

“You’ll need the key,” said Bronwyn, and she pointed out a ring on the unconscious guard’s belt. “It’s the big gold one. I’ve been watching him!”

I scrambled to the guard and tore the keys from his belt. Then I stood frozen with them in my hand, my eyes darting between the cell doors and Emma.

“Hurry up and let us out!” Enoch said.

“With which key?” I said. The ring held dozens, all identical save the big gold one.

Emma’s face fell. “Oh, no.”

More guards would be coming soon, and unlocking every cell would cost precious minutes. So we ran to the end of the hall, unlocked the door, and gave the keys to Hugh, whose cell was closest. “Free yourself and then the others!” I said.

“Then stay here until we come back to get you,” Emma added.

“No chance!” Hugh said. “We’re coming after you!”

“When we find him,” Enoch said, “I’d like to pull out his fingernails before we kill him. Anyone have a problem with that?”

“As long as I can send a squadron of bees up his nose first,” said Hugh.

“Something inspiring,” said Hugh.

“Something that’ll make us less terrified,” said Horace.

I drove my hollow into the corridor, clutching at its neck to keep from being thrown off its back. Emma fell in behind me with the others, using her flaming hands as signals in the smoke. Together we charged down the hall, my battalion of monsters before me, my army of peculiar behind. First among them were the strongest and the bravest: Emma, Bronwyn, and Hugh, then the ymbrynes and grumbling Perplexus, whoinsisted on bringing his heavy Map of Days. Last came the youngest children, the timid, the injured.

“Out of my way!” said Hugh, trying to push past Emma and me, who were blocking the door.

Thirty seconds later we were out in the open courtyard, and Horace and Hugh were reeling Olive up into the air by a rope around her waist. Right away she became our invaluable eye in the sky, shouting back intel that my ground-bound hollows could never have gathered.

We began marching, toward the edge of the courtyard. Astride my personal hollow, I felt like a general commanding his troops from horseback. Emma was at my side, and the other peculiars were just behind: Bronwyn collecting loose bricks to hurl, Horace and Hugh hanging on to Olive’s rope, Millard attaching himself to Perplexus, who was unleashing a constant stream of Italian profanities while shielding himself with his Map of Days. At the back, the ymbrynes whistled and made loud bird calls in attempt to recruit winged friends to our cause, but Devil’s Acre was such a dead zone that there were few wild birds to be found. Miss Peregrine had taken charge of old Miss Avocet and the few shell-shocked ymbrynes. There was nowhere to leave them; they’d have to accompany us into battle.

The hollow and I closed the remaining gap in just a few seconds, my friends close behind. Then we were among them, fighting hand-to-hand, and the advantage was ours. While I concentrated on knocking the guns out of the wights’ hands, my friends put their peculiar talents to good use. Emma swung her hands like flaming clubs, cutting through a line of wights. Bronwyn hurled the bricks she’d gathered, then punched and pummeled the wights with her bare hands. Hugh’s lone bee had recently made some friends, and as he cheered them on (“Go for the eyes, fellows!”) they swirled around and dive-bombed our enemy wherever they could. So did the ymbrynes, who’d turned themselves into birds after the first gunshots. Miss Peregrine was most fearsome, her huge beak and talons sending wights running, but even small, colorful Miss Bunting made herself useful, ripping one wight’s hair and pecking his head hard enough to make him miss the shot he was taking—which allowed Claire to leap up and bite him on the shoulder with her wide, sharp-toothed backmouth. Enoch did his part, too, revealing from under his shirt three clay men with forks for legs and knives for arms, which he sent hacking after the wights’ ankles. All the while, Olive shouted advice to us from her bird’s-eye view. “Behind you, Emma! He’s going for his gun, Hugh!”

Miss Peregrine screamed overhead, dive-bombing fleeing wights. She pulled one off his feet by the back of his neck, but this, and more attacks from Hugh’s bees, only made the nine that were left run even faster. Their lead was growing and my hollow was beginning to fail, leaking black fluid from a half dozen wounds.

It was bees. A stream of Hugh’s bees had flown out of the crush and now they were in Caul’s eyes, stinging him as he let out a shattering howl. The ymbrynes and peculiars fell to the ground, the ball they’d formed collapsing, bodies spilling out everywhere. They hadn’t been crushed, thank God.

“Bronwyn, take my feet!” she said. “We’ll make a chain. Emma grabs Bronwyn’s legs, and Jacob Emma’s legs, and Horace Emma’s, and Horace Hugh’s …”

“My left leg’s hurt!” Hugh said.

“Then Horace will grab your right one!” Olive said.

My feet came off the ground. Hugh grabbed onto my legs and Horace onto his legs and Enoch onto his and so on, until even Perplexus and Addison and Sharon and his cousins had caught a ride. We strung out into the air like a strange, wiggling kite, Millard its invisible tail. The other, smaller ymbrynes hooked into our clothes here and there and flapped furiously, adding what lift they could.

There were spontaneous bursts of cheering, laughter, songs. Millard and Bronwyn danced across the scarred ground. Olive and Claire clung to Miss Peregrine, who carried them in her arms as she buzzed around, checking on things. Horace kept pinching himself, suspicious that this was just one of his dreams, some beautiful future that hadn’t yet come to be. Hugh wandered off by himself, no doubt missing Fiona, whose absence had left a hole in us all. Millard was busy fretting over his hero, Perplexus, whose rapid aging had stopped when we entered Abaton and, strangely, not yet resumed. But it would, Millard assured us, and now that Caul’s tower was destroyed, it was unclear how Perplexus would reach his old loop. (There was Bentham’s Panloopticon, of course, but which of its hundred doors was the right one?)

We observed a moment of silence for Fiona. She wasn’t dead, Hugh insisted, but merely lost. The trees had cushioned her fall, he said, and she was probably wandering in the forest somewhere near Miss Wren’s menagerie. Or had knocked her head on the way down and forgotten where she came from. Or was hiding …

He looked around hopefully at us, but we avoided his eyes.

“I’m sure she’ll turn up,” Bronwyn assured him.

“Don’t give him false hope,” Enoch said. “It’s cruel.”

“You would know about cruel,” Bronwyn replied scornfully.

“What’s it like to control one?” asked Hugh. “Do you imagine you’re one of them, like I do my bees?”

The next was a photo of several adults descending a set of narrow steps to a beach and a rowboat. _There’s a very nice loop on the shore of the Caspian Sea, Emma had written, and last week Nim and some of the ymbrynes went on a boating trip there. Hugh and Horace and I tagged along but stayed on the shore. We’ve all had enough of rowboats, thank you._

He honked the horn and my eyes flew open, but what I saw convinced me that I’d succeeded in willing myself into a dream. Standing there before of our car, lined up across the driveway and shining in the glare our headlights, were all my peculiar friends. Emma, Horace, Enoch, Olive, Claire, Hugh, even Millard—and out in front of them, a traveling coat across her shoulders and a carpetbag in her hand, Miss Peregrine.

I tried to picture a girl with a mouth in the back of her head and a boy with bees buzzing around him getting through airport security. And Millard: had they snuck him onto an airplane? How did they even get passports?


	4. A Map of Days

Here was Enoch, splayed upon our beige sectional, sipping Coke from my dad’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers tumbler; here was Olive, unstrapping her lead shoes to float ceilingward and ride circles on our fan; here were Horace and Hugh in our kitchen, Horace studying the photos on the fridge door while Hugh rustled for a snack; here was Claire, both mouths slack as she gazed at the great black monolith of our wall-mounted television; here was Millard, my mother’s decor magazines rising from the coffee table and splitting in midair as he skimmed them, the shape of his bare feet imprinted into our carpet. It was a mingling of worlds I’d imagined a thousand times but never dreamed possible. But here it was: my Before and After, colliding with the force of planets.

Miss Peregrine was talking to Hugh by the open fridge. They looked jarringly out of place amid the stainless steel and hard edges of my parents’ modern kitchen, like actors who had wandered onto the wrong movie set. Hugh was waving a package of plasticwrapped string cheese.

“But there’s only strange food here, and I haven’t eaten for centuries!”

“Don’t exaggerate, Hugh.”

“I’m not. It’s 1886 in Devil’s Acre, and that’s where we had breakfast.”

“Surely you won’t perish of hunger in the next five minutes,” Miss Peregrine said, and shooed both Horace and Hugh from the kitchen. “Now, then. You were looking a bit wobbly earlier, Mr. Portman. Are you feeling all right?”

The pack expanded enough for me to inhale. Then Hugh inserted himself into the gap and poked me in the chest.

“You know it’s not all of us who are here, right?” A solitary bee zipped around him in agitated circles. The others moved back, giving Hugh and his angry bee some space. “When you said you were glad we were all here. Well, we’re not.”

It took me a moment to realize what he meant, and then I felt ashamed. “I’m sorry, Hugh. I didn’t mean to leave out Fiona.”

He looked down at his fuzzy striped socks. “Sometimes I feel like everyone but me has forgotten her.” His bottom lip trembled, and then he clenched his fists to make it stop. “She’s not dead, you know.”

“I hope you’re right.”

He met my eyes, defiant. “She’s not.”

“Okay. She’s not.”

“I really miss her, Jacob.”

“We all do,” I said. “I didn’t mean to leave her out, and I haven’t forgotten her.”

“Apology accepted,” Hugh said, and then he wiped his face, turned on his heel, and walked out of the room.

“If you can believe it,” Millard said after a moment, “that was progress.”

“He’ll barely even talk to any of us,” said Emma. “He’s angry, and he won’t face the truth.”

“You don’t think it’s possible Fiona could be alive somewhere?” I asked.

“I’d rate it unlikely,” said Millard.

Miss Peregrine winced and put a finger to her lips—she’d been gliding toward us across the room—and with a hand on our backs, she pushed us into a private huddle. “We put out word to every loop and peculiar community we’re in contact with,” she said quietly. “We’ve distributed communiques, bulletins, photographs, detailed descriptions—I even sent Miss Wren’s pigeon scouts to search the forests for Fiona. Thus far, nothing.”

Millard sighed. “If she was alive, poor thing, wouldn’t she have reached out to us by now? We aren’t difficult to find.”

“I guess so,” I said. “But has anyone tried looking for her . . . um . . .”

“Her body?” Millard said.

“Millard, please,” said the headmistress.

“Was that indelicate? Should I have chosen a less exact term?”

“Just be quiet,” Miss Peregrine hissed.

Millard didn’t lack feeling; he just wasn’t good at minding the feelings of others.

“The fall that likely killed Fiona,” Millard said, “occurred in Miss Wren’s menagerie loop, which has since collapsed. If her body was there, it is no longer recoverable.”

“I’ve been weighing whether to hold a memorial service,” Miss Peregrine said. “But I can’t even raise the topic without sending Hugh into a spiral of depression. I fear if we push him too hard—”

“He won’t even adopt new bees,” said Millard. “He says he wouldn’t love them the same if they’d never met Fiona, so he only keeps the one, who’s of a rather advanced age at this point.”

“Sounds like this change of scenery might do him good,” I said.

Just then the doorbell rang. And not a moment too soon, as the mood in the room was growing heavier by the second.

They had visited a loop in ancient Mongolia and watched a peculiar shepherd speak the language of sheep, tending his flock without a stick or a dog, just the sound of his own voice. Olive’s favorite had been a trip to a loop in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa, where in a certain little town every peculiar could float just like she did. They had strung nets everywhere above the town so the people could go about their days without weighing themselves down, and they bounced from place to place like acrobats in zero gravity. There was a loop in Amazonia, too, that had become a popular place to visit: a fantastic city in the jungle made from trees, the roots and branches all knotted together to form roads and bridges and houses. The peculiars there could manipulate plants much the way Fiona did—which Hugh had found so distressing and overwhelming that he had scurried out of the loop and back to Devil’s Acre almost immediately.

That night, I could hardly sleep. It wasn’t so much the snores of Hugh as he dozed in a pile of blankets on my floor as it was a buzzing in my head, filled now with uncertainty and exciting new prospects. When I left Devil’s Acre to come back home, it was because I had decided that finishing high school and keeping my parents in my life were important enough goals that they were worth enduring Englewood for a couple more years. The time between now and graduation had promised to be a special kind of torment, though, especially with Emma and my friends stuck in loops on the other side of the Atlantic.

The whole downstairs was full of cheerful conversation and the warm smells of cooking food. Horace was banging around in the kitchen while Emma and Millard set the table. Miss Peregrine was whistling to herself and opening windows to let in a morning breeze. Outside I could see Olive and Bronwyn and Claire chasing one another around the yard—Bronwyn catching Olive and tossing her twenty feet into the air, Olive laughing like mad as she fluttered down again at half speed, the weight of her shoes just enough to overcome her natural buoyancy. In the living room, Hugh and Enoch were glued to the television, watching a commercial for laundry detergent in rapt wonderment. It was as welcome a sight as I could have imagined, and for a long moment I stood unnoticed at the bottom of the stairs, taking it in. In the space of a single night, my friends had managed to make my house a happier, cozier place than it had been in all years I lived here with my parents.

“That’s right. There will be no killing of anyone in the present.”

“What if they’re really annoying?” asked Hugh.

I gave my friends permission to raid the closets for beach-appropriate clothing, since they had none, and it was truly strange to see them return a few minutes later dressed in something like modern outfits. Nothing fit Olive or Claire, so they added floppy sun hats and dark glasses to what they were already wearing, which made them look like celebrities trying to dodge paparazzi. Millard wore nothing at all save a slather of sunscreen across his face and shoulders, which turned him into a sort of walking blur. Bronwyn had on a floral top and slouchy linen pants, Enoch had snagged some swim shorts and an old T-shirt, and Horace looked downright preppy in a blue polo and a pair of khaki chinos, cuffs neatly rolled. The only one who hadn’t changed was Hugh; still moody and moping, he had volunteered to stay behind and watch over my parents. I gave him my uncle’s phone, pulled up my own cell number on the screen, and showed him how to call me in case they started waking up.

“It’s Hugh,” said Horace, handing me my phone as I slogged out of the surf. I held it away from my dripping head. “Hello?”

“Jacob! Your uncles are waking up. Your parents, too, I think.”

“I’ll be there in five minutes,” I said. “Just keep them where they are.”

“I’ll try, but hurry,” said Hugh. “I don’t have any more of that dust stuff, and your uncles are mean.”

I stepped on the dropped knife and slid it under a cabinet, just in case my mom came to. Emma, Horace, Hugh, and Millard lifted her and carried her toward the couch. There was nothing more I could do, so I ran upstairs.

Because my parents’ now-three-doored sedan could only accommodate half our group, we’d have to go shopping in two shifts. Shift one would include Emma, because I always gave her preferential treatment and made no secret of it; Olive, because she was a cheerful presence and I wanted some cheering; Millard, because he wouldn’t stop pestering me; and Bronwyn, because her muscles were the only way to force open the stuck garage door. I promised Hugh, Horace, Enoch, and Claire that I’d be back for them in a couple of hours. Horace said he wasn’t interested in buying new clothes, anyway.

“I’ve so looked forward to meeting you all,” she said warmly. “Alma has been telling me about you for so long, I feel like I already know you. You must be Emma, the spark. And Hugh, the auto-apiarist?”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Hugh.

“Then you should appeal directly to him,” said Hugh.

“I’ll do that,” Millard said.

“She’s under a lot of pressure,” said Bronwyn.

“And she’s taking it out on us,” said Hugh. “It isn’t fair.”

While lingering on an old episode of Star Trek, Hugh asked, “Do a lot of people own spaceships now?”

I could see it was starting to upset them. Emma was tense, Hugh was pacing, and Horace was squeezing the arm of the sofa in a death grip.

A slash of moonlight divided the room. Enoch and Hugh lay snoring in my bed. The hurt in my stomach was an old and familiar one. It was both pain and a compass needle.

The first batch were Hugh, Claire, Olive, and Horace. I drove them to the mall. Not the mall by my house, where I worried we might encounter someone from my school. I picked the Shaker Pines mall, out by the Interstate. On the way, I pointed out the basic components of modern suburbia—that’s a bank, that’s a hospital, those are condos —because they kept asking what everything was. What seemed utterly banal to me was wondrous to them.

“When I was growing up,” said Hugh, “if you were old enough to lift something heavy, you were old enough to work. There was no sitting around all day, eating and talking.”

“We were old enough to work even before we could lift heavy things,” said Olive. “My father sent me to work at a boot-blacking factory when I was five. It was awful.”

“Mine sent me to a workhouse,” said Hugh. “I spent all day making rope.”

“Something big is going on,” said Millard.

“Where were you two?” said Hugh.

“Bum-touching on the beach?” said Enoch.

“Off in Abe’s secret bunker?” said Bronwyn.

“And what secret bunker would you be referring to?” asked Hugh.

He wasn’t with us when we’d found it. He didn’t know.

Their reactions were divided. Claire got angry and Horace got quiet and nervous. Hugh and Bronwyn were cautious, but I thought they could be swayed. Enoch, Millard, and Olive, on the other hand, seemed ready to jump in the car with us right then.

“Miss P’s been so good to us,” Claire said dourly. “We owe her more than this.”

“I agree,” said Bronwyn. “I won’t lie to her. I hate lying.”

“In my opinion, we’re much too concerned with what Miss Peregrine thinks,” said Emma.

“I think missions like the ones my grandfather and his group used to do are what we’re supposed to be doing,” I said. “Not glorified office work for the reconstruction.”

“I like my assignment,” said Hugh.

“But we’re wasted in the Acre,” said Millard. “We can go fearlessly into the present. Who else with our level of experience can do that?”

“She didn’t mean we should go now,” said Hugh. “We’ve only had one day of normalling lessons!”

“You could be ready,” I said.

“Half of us don’t even have modern clothes yet!” said Horace.

“We’ll figure it out!” I said. “Look, there are peculiar children in America who need our help, and I think that’s more important than rebuilding some loops.”

“Hear, hear,” said Emma.

“There’s one who needs help,” said Hugh. “Maybe. If this H fellow isn’t lying.”

Enoch, Olive, and Millard raised their hands. Claire, Hugh, Bronwyn, and Horace did not.

“What about you, Apiston?” Emma said to Hugh.

“I would come,” he said, “but I’ve got my own mission to do.”

We knew what he meant without having to say it. He would be searching the Panloopticon for Fiona.

“We understand,” I said. “We’ll keep a lookout for her on our travels.”

He nodded heavily. “Thanks, Jacob.”

“When will you be back?” asked Hugh.

“Give us a week before you start worrying,” I said.

“Out looking for you,” said another voice. “This is Hugh, incidentally.”

Now I was imagining them all crowded around the receiver in my parents’ room, listening with their heads together.

“Hi, Hugh,” said Emma. “Where’s Miss P looking for us?”

“She didn’t say. She just told us not to leave the house or we’d be grounded forever, then flew off.”

“Grounded, my buttock!” said Enoch. “You can’t let her treat you like babies.”

“Easy for you to say,” said Hugh. “You’re out there having adventures while we’re here with a steaming-mad headmistress. We got a four-hour lecture last night—which was meant for you—about responsibility and honor and trust and on and on until I thought my head would fall off.”

We said we would remember, and then Horace and Olive said goodbye. Before he hung up, Hugh asked us if we had heard anything about Fiona during our travels.

I looked at Emma, who looked as ashamed as I suddenly felt.

“Not yet,” Emma said. “But we’ll keep asking, Hugh. Everywhere we go.”

“Okay,” he said softly. “Thanks.” And he hung up.

I put the phone down. Emma turned and grimaced at the back seat.

“Don’t look at me that way,” said Enoch. “Fiona was a wonderful, sweet girl. But she is dead, and if Hugh can’t accept that, it isn’t our fault.”

“We should still have asked,” said Bronwyn. “We could have asked at the Flamingo hotel, and in Portal . . .”

“We’ll ask from now on,” I said. “And if it turns out she really is dead, at least we can say we did right by Hugh.”

“What about the others? Are they coming to see me?” I hadn’t seen Horace, Hugh, Olive, or Claire since we’d left on the mission, which felt like a lifetime ago.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unpopular opinion- I think Jacob and Emma were a terrible couple.


	5. The Conference of the Birds

“We might ask the same of you!” said another familiar voice—and as Bronwyn let me  go I saw Hugh coming toward us. “Blimey, what happened in here?”

First Bronwyn, now Hugh. My head was spinning.

Bronwyn set me down. “Never mind that. He’s all right, Hugh! And here’s Miss Noor.”

“Hi,” Noor said again. Then, quickly, “So there’s, like, four guys with guns coming for  us right now—”

“I coshed two on the head,” said Bronwyn, holding up a pair of fingers.

“I chased off another with my bees,” said Hugh.

We jaywalked, we ignored red lights and DON’T WALK signs, edging into the street until  there was a stall in traffic, or sometimes just going for it in a mad dash and letting the cars  honk and swerve, because getting run over was better than being dragged back to Leo’s loop.  His goons had been on us like a bad cold, tailing us through the grit of Chinatown and up the  streets of a touristy Italian neighborhood, then nearly catching up to us when we got stuck on  the median strip of busy Houston Street. They were easy to spot in their old suits. Finally, just  when I was beginning to wonder how much longer I could run, Noor poured on more speed to  catch up with Bronwyn and pulled her around a corner. Hugh and I followed them, and a short  time later Noor hauled Bronwyn to the side again, this time through a door into a seemingly  random store. It was a cramped little bodega that sold beer and dry goods.  As the owner shouted something at us, we all saw two of Leo’s guys dash past the front  door without stopping. Then Noor pushed us down a narrow aisle, through a door into a  stockroom, past a surprised employee on a smoke break, and out through a swinging metal  door into an alley lined with dumpsters.

It seemed we had shaken them off—for a moment, anyway—and we allowed ourselves  to stop for a minute and catch our breath. Bronwyn had hardly broken a sweat, but Noor,  Hugh, and I were gasping.

“That was quick thinking,” Bronwyn said, impressed.

“Yeah,” Hugh said. “Nicely done.”

“Thanks,” said Noor. “Not my first rodeo.”

“We should be safe here for a minute,” Hugh said between breaths. “Let’s give them  some time to think we’re long gone, then move.”

“I should probably ask where you’re taking us,” I said.

“I’d certainly love to know,” Noor said, one eyebrow rising.

“Back to the Acre,” said Hugh. “Closest loop entrance ain’t pleasant, but it ain’t far . . .”

I couldn’t stop looking at my friends. Part of me had worried I might never lay eyes on  them again. Or that, if I did, they would act like strangers.

And then Hugh drew back his fist and punched me in the arm.

“Ow! What was that for?”

“Why didn’t you tell us you were doing some daft rescue mission?”

Noor was gaping at us.

“I tried,” I said.

“Not very hard, you didn’t!” said Bronwyn.

“Well, I dropped some awfully big hints,” I said defensively. “But it was pretty clear no  one wanted to help me.”

Hugh looked ready to punch me again. “Maybe not, but we would have!”

“Told you he was a Sensitive Sally.” Hugh shook his head. “Give your old mates some  credit, man. My God.”

“Sorry,” I said meekly.

“I mean, really.”

Noor leaned toward me and whispered, “No friends, huh?”

“I don’t know what to say.” My heart was suddenly so full it seemed to crowd out the  words from my brain. “I’m really glad to see you guys.”

“And we you,” said Bronwyn. She hugged me again, and this time Hugh did, too.

And then a gunshot rang out from one end of the alley and we all startled, then broke  apart to see two men in suits booking it toward us.

I shot down the subway steps three at a time. Hugh slid on the metal banister. In the crowded  vestibule we shoved through knots of rush-hour commuters. Noor shouted, “Like this!”  behind her and then jumped a turnstile—we all followed suit.

The train was uncomfortably close as Hugh and I crossed the last track, the wind and  noise it pushed strengthening by the second, and then Bronwyn and Noor hauled us up onto  the opposite platform just before it thundered past, brakes squealing like some creature from  hell.

“How did you find me?” I said to Bronwyn and Hugh.

“Emma realized what you were probably up to, after all your talk about her.” Hugh  nodded to Noor and said, “Nice to properly meet you, by the way, I’m Hugh . . .” He reached  over and shook Noor’s hand.

“No,” said Hugh. “She doesn’t know about this.”

“She probably does by now,” said Bronwyn. “She’s awfully good at knowing things.”

“We thought more than two of us leaving might attract too much attention.”

“We all drew straws,” said Bronwyn. “Hugh and me won.” She glanced at Hugh. “Think  Miss P will be mad at us for coming?”

Hugh nodded vigorously. “Steaming. But proud, too. Assuming we can get him back  home in one piece.”

“Home?” Noor said. “Where’s that?”

“A loop in late-1800s London called Devil’s Acre,” Hugh said. “Closest thing we got to  a home, anyhow.”

Noor’s eyebrows furrowed. “Sounds . . . delightful.”

“It’s rough around the edges, but it has a certain charm. It’s better than living out of a  suitcase, at any rate.”

She had lowered her voice a bit, unsure of whether Bronwyn and Hugh knew, or should  know, about this.

“All what things?” Hugh asked.

“You mean a wight?” said Hugh. “That’s the only thing hollows turn into.”

“It can wait,” I said.

Hugh and Bronwyn both gave me curious looks.

Bronwyn and Hugh waved at us to follow and then disappeared through the hole.

Hugh popped his head back out. “You two coming?”

Bronwyn and Hugh were twenty feet ahead, waving with increasing urgency for us to  follow.

We raced through the high grass with Bronwyn and Hugh, up the steps past signs that  blurred in my vision but said things like CONDEMNED PROPERTY and NO TRESPASSING, to an  entrance that had been boarded over and broken open again. The splintered wood and bent  nails gnawed at us like teeth as we contorted ourselves into the breach, once more to be  entombed in a place we might never leave.

The building was so dark and packed with trash that we couldn’t quite run, not without  impaling ourselves on some sharp obstacle or tripping into a hole in the floor, so instead we  scurried sideways like crabs, taking long, kicking steps and sweeping our arms in front of us,  following Hugh and Bronwyn. They were familiar with this place. We could hear Leo’s guys  in the yard, coming through the fence, pounding up the steps. Bronwyn had blocked the hole  through which we’d entered by shoving an old fridge in front of it—it seemed to have been  left close by for just that purpose—but we knew that wouldn’t slow Leo’s guys for long.

“Better than that,” said Hugh over his shoulder. “It’s a Panloopticon door.”

“Back so soon?” he said to Bronwyn and Hugh.

“Yes, but we can’t stay,” said Bronwyn.

“We need to get out now,” said Hugh.

Dogface leaned against the piano. “Exit fee is two hundred.”

“You said the fee was round-trip!” Hugh said angrily.

“You must have misheard me. You did seem to be in an awful hurry when I was  explaining our pricing . . .”

We heard a distant shout, then the scrape of metal against stone. They were starting to  move the refrigerator.

Dogface tipped his head toward the sound. “What’s that? You haven’t gotten yourselves  into trouble, have you?”

“Yeah,” I said irritably, “there’s someone chasing us.”

“Oh no,” he said, clicking his tongue at me. “That’s going to cost you a bit extra. We’ll  have to deceive them, cover for you . . . and are those Leo Burnham’s flunkies? They sound  angry.”

“Fine. Whatever it costs,” said Bronwyn.

We were dying to just knock him out of the way, but we knew he could cause us endless  trouble if he wanted to.

“Five hundred,” said Dogface.

Another scraping sound, this one longer than the last. They were making progress.

“I only have four hundred,” said Hugh, digging in his pocket.

“Too bad.” Dogface turned to go.

“We’ll pay you tomorrow!” said Bronwyn.

Dogface turned back. “Tomorrow it’ll be seven hundred.”

There was a loud, splintering crash. They’d broken through.

“Okay! Fine!” Hugh said, an agitated bee escaping his lips.

“Not hiding,” Hugh said. “Traveling.”

“She don’t like it,” said the warthog girl. “She’s scared!”

The Untouchables all tittered in the doorway behind us.

Noor was already out of the room, crossing to another open door across the hall, the last  alternative before going back the way we’d come.

Bronwyn and Hugh started after her, but I blocked them. “Let me talk to her,” I said.

Bronwyn and Hugh were waiting at the door, looking panicked. “Ready?” Hugh said.

“Better be,” said Dogface, leaning in. “By the way, if we have to cosh one of ’em for  you, that’s a thousand.”

Hugh was standing beside it—and when he saw us coming he called to us, waved us on, and  dove in.

We ran to the open freezer and squinted into the blackness inside. It wasn’t just a cabinet  for a corpse: it was a narrow tunnel that seemed to go on forever. Hugh’s voice echoed from  somewhere deep within, receding quickly. “Whoooaaaaa!”

We tumbled out of a small closet onto the long, red-carpeted hallway of Bentham’s  Panloopticon. Bronwyn was collecting herself when Noor and I arrived, and Hugh  was already waiting, looking slightly impatient.

“I was beginning to wonder if you’d decided not to join us!” he said as Bronwyn pulled  Noor and I up effortlessly.

“Do you think they’ll come after us?” I said, glancing nervously at the door.

“No chance,” Bronwyn said. “The Untouchables like to get paid.”

I turned to Noor. “How are you?” I said, quiet and close.

“I’m fine,” she said quickly, seeming embarrassed. “Really sorry about my little freakout back there.” She was talking to the three of us and looking around at the plush hallway.  “This place is definitely better than the one we just left.”

Hugh started to say we should be going, but Noor interrupted him. “One more thing I  need to say before we go anywhere or meet anyone else.” She looked at us. “Thank you all for  helping me. I’m grateful.”

“You’re welcome,” Hugh said, maybe a bit too breezily.

She frowned. “I’m serious.”

“We are, too,” said Bronwyn.

“You can thank us when we get back to the house,” said Hugh. “Come on, or Sharon’s  toadies will notice us and start asking questions I imagine we’d rather not answer.”

“It’s actually proved quite useful,” Hugh cut in. “This loop we’re in, Devil’s Acre, used  to be a prison for miscreant peculiars . . . then became a lawless place and our enemies, the  wights, made their headquarters here—”

“Until Jacob helped us smash them and killed their leader,” Bronwyn said proudly.

At the mention of Caul, goose bumps had spontaneously broken out on my arms. “He’s  not exactly dead,” I interjected.

“Fine,” said Hugh, “he’s trapped in a collapsed loop he can never, ever get out of, which  is basically the same thing.”

“And now the wights are all dead or locked up in jail,” said Bronwyn. “And because  they destroyed or seriously damaged many of our loops, a lot of peculiars had nowhere else to  go and were forced to move in here.”

“Temporarily, we hope,” Hugh said. “The ymbrynes are trying to rebuild the loops we  lost now.”

I turned to see a wall of black robes. It was Sharon, towering behind us. Noor pressed  her back against the window, but her face betrayed no fear. Hugh and Bronwyn saw what was  happening and slunk over to an informational stand about loop costuming, trying not to be  noticed.

We slipped away from him. Bronwyn and Hugh were waiting by the stairwell. “What  did he want?” asked Hugh.

“I have no idea,” I lied. And we hurried down the stairs.

Hugh hailed him as he passed. “Hullo, Javier, how goes the production?”

The tall man stopped too quickly and had to pinwheel his arms and steady himself  against the roof of a building to keep from toppling over. Then he bent to look at Hugh.

“Sorry, didn’t see you down there,” he boomed. “The production’s hit a snag, unfortunately.  Some cast members have been called away on loop-rehabilitation assignments, so we’re  restaging The Grass Menagerie, instead. They’re over in the Green rehearsing right now . . .”

He gestured with his comparatively normal-length arm to a pocket of muddy grass  across the street (the closest thing the Acre had to a park), where a troupe of Miss Grackle’s  student actors were tottering around in grotesque animal costumes, practicing their lines.

Noor gaped at them as we walked on, engrossed in the strange sight until Hugh kicked  the stones and muttered to himself, “Too bad! I was looking forward to coaching the actor  who plays me.”

Noor turned, a half smile forming on her lips. “They’re doing a play about you?”

I felt the heat of embarrassment start creeping up my neck. “Uh, yeah, one of the ymbrynes has a theater troupe . . . it’s no big deal . . .” I waved my hand dismissively and peered ahead, hoping

to find a quick way to distract her and change the subject.

“Oh, don’t be modest,” said Hugh. “It’s a whole play about how Jacob helped save us  from the wights and banish Caul to an interdimensional hell.”

“It’s a big honor!” said Bronwyn, grinning broadly. “Jacob’s really famous around here —”

“Whoa, check that out!” I shouted, hoping Noor hadn’t heard that last bit. I pivoted and  pointed at a small crowd of people in nearby Pye Square, where it looked like two peculiars  were competing at something.

“It’s a doorlifter contest!” Bronwyn said, successfully distracted. “I’ve been meaning to  enter, but I need to train a bit first—”

“Let’s not dawdle,” said Hugh, but Bronwyn slowed to stare as we passed by, as did the  rest of us.

Wonder. Not horror. Not revulsion. And I started to think she might just fit in here.  I suddenly realized I didn’t know where we were heading. Bronwyn and Hugh had said  something about our “house,” but last I’d checked, our friends were living in the rambling  dormitories that occupied the ground level of the Panloopticon. When we started to cross a  ramshackle footbridge over Fever Ditch, I finally asked where we were going.

“Miss P moved us out of Bentham’s house while you were at the bone-mender’s,” Hugh  explained, “away from nosy folk and their prying ears. Watch out for this board, it’s loose!”

He hopped over a plank that fell away and splashed into the black water below. Noor  stepped over it easily, but it took me a head-swimming moment to stretch out my leg and  force myself over the gap.

And he began shoving us toward the house. Tumbling through the tilting door, I glanced  over my shoulder to find Noor, but saw only Bronwyn’s and Hugh’s beaming smiles. And  then I was being led into a cozy, low-ceilinged living room-kitchen-stable (judging by the  chickens clucking in one corner and the hay scattered around), and my friends were rushing  into the room, one after another. Suddenly, I was being attacked by hugs and there was a loud,  happy hubbub, everyone all talking at once.

“People say things when they’re upset,” Hugh snapped. “It doesn’t mean they don’t care  if you live or die.”

“I hope you’ll stay here with us,” said Hugh. “After all you’ve been through, you  deserve a rest.”

“Sounds like a looped hurricane, or a cyclone,” said Hugh.

“Any friend of Jacob’s is a friend of ours,” said Hugh. “And this is how we treat  friends.”

“Already?” said Hugh. “Back in the Untouchables’ loop—”

“Virus,” said Hugh.

“It ‘respects no borders,’” Emma said, as if repeating from a textbook.

“Then maybe war is inevitable,” said Hugh.

“No,” Miss Peregrine said. “I refuse to accept that.”

“You’ll bunk with Horace and me,” said Hugh.

“And you can have my bed,” Olive said to Noor.

“I could never. I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“It’s no trouble,” Olive said. “I usually sleep on the ceiling anyway.”

“The facilities are quite basic, in as much as there are none,” Hugh said. He pointed at a  bucket at the end of the hallway. “That’s the bathroom.” He turned and pointed to another  bucket at the other end. “And that’s clean boiled water to drink. Don’t get them confused.”

Bolting upright in bed, I saw that Hugh and Horace were already up, crowding each  other to get a look out the window.

“What’s going on?” I shouted, stumbling out of my sheets.

“Something bad,” Hugh said.

The minion ran downstairs to answer it, and a short time later, after a thunderous noise  of feet pounding up the stairs, Hugh and Emma appeared, out of breath.

“You need to come back,” Emma said.

“We tried to call but the line was engaged,” said Hugh.

“What’s going on?” I said, trading a worried look with Noor. “Did you find V’s loop?”

Noor looked hopeful, but Emma was shaking her head. “Not yet,” she said. “It’s Horace.  He’s with Miss Avocet right now. When he told her what he was after, she met with him right  away. And they’re waiting for us.”

“Apparently they found something,” Hugh said. “Something big. But they wouldn’t say  what.”

Emma and Hugh had a boat waiting for us at the dock, and this one had a motor on it. Emma  barked at the boatman to drive like his life depended on it, and a minute later we were flying  through the loop entrance so fast my head was spinning. We left a wide brown wake behind  us in Fever Ditch, and had to hang on to the sides of the boat to keep from falling out, and  when we finally docked in the center of town, I’d never been so happy to touch dry land.

“But it means something terrible will happen,” said Hugh. “With lots of dying.”

“What about the seven?” Noor said.

“But someone must have looked in on her now and then,” Hugh said. “Maybe it couldn’t  have been V, but . . .”

That gave me an idea.

I took Miss Avocet aside and asked her if she had any pictures of my grandfather in her  archives. Within a short time one was located. It was a snapshot of Abe sitting on the porch of  a house peering down the sight of a rifle, taken years ago, Miss Avocet explained, during a  loop invasion preparedness drill. I showed it to Noor.

“He looks a lot younger here, but I think that’s Mr. Gandy.” She looked a bit confused.  “Why? Did you know him?”

My heart skipped a beat.

Emma crowded in to look, then gasped. “Abe!”

Gandy had been Abe’s alias.

“That’s my grandfather,” I said, and now Hugh and Horace were jostling to see the  picture, too.

“Memory-wipes are quite common,” said Bronwyn.

“On normals,” Hugh said in an undertone.

Hugh sighed. “Even three or four US states is still an awfully big haystack.”

“Granted,” said Millard. “But it’s a smaller one than we had before.”

“Hugh,” Millard barked, “climb up and get every atlas from that topmost shelf there,  and be very careful with the big one, it’s a real Map of Days and it’s in delicate condition.  Jacob, make a list of all the loops in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and  Maryland with long rivers immediately to the north and west of them. And Noor, I have a  special task for you.”

“Two stars out of how many?” Hugh asked.

“Five. Though it’s the only establishment in the Acre to have been rated above one,  so . . .”

Hugh slammed a book down a bit too hard. “If you all had only cared this bloody much  about finding Fiona,” he said angrily, “we would’ve had her back by now.”

Emma looked stung. “Oh, Hugh,” she said, but he was already hurrying out, trying his  best to hold back tears. A single bee buzzed in the spot where he’d been working.

“I’ll talk to him,” Emma said, and ran after him.

Noor looked at me. “What just happened?”

Millard said, “Our friend Fiona—who Hugh has long been in love with—went missing a  while ago. She’s presumed dead.”

Bronwyn picked up the atlas Hugh had been leafing through. “Oh no,” she said  mournfully. “He was reading about Ireland.” She held up the book for us to see.

“Enoch, you were supposed to be watching him!” Claire cried.

Enoch only rolled his eyes.

“Fiona is from Ireland,” I explained to Noor.

“I’m so sorry,” said Noor, shaking her head. “This must be so awful for him.”

“You know, I had a dream about Fiona the other night,” said Horace.

Our heads whipped in his direction.

“You did?” I asked. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I didn’t want to get his hopes up. Not all my dreams are prophetic, and it can take time  to sort out which are which.”

“What was the dream?” I asked.

Millard went back to his atlas. “I’m listening,” he said. “But you know I don’t put much  stock in dreams.”

“I know, Millard. You’ve only told me ten thousand times.” Horace shook his head, but continued. “Anyway, in the dream Fiona was riding on a bus. There was a little boy with her, in a green tunic and a little hat with a feather in it. And she was frightened. I felt, very keenly, that she was in

danger. It could mean nothing. But I wanted to tell someone.”

“I think dreams contain lots of meaning,” said Noor. “But that meaning doesn’t have to  be literally true.”

Horace looked at her gratefully.

“Just please don’t tell Hugh,” said Millard. “He’ll have us checking every bus in Britain,  and when we find nothing, he’ll be even more crushed than before.”

Emma and Hugh returned a while later with cups of takeout stew for everybody. Hugh  apologized for his outburst, Emma rewarmed each of our stews with a quick dip of her pinkie  into the brown liquid, and we ate while we worked.

“Don’t any of you dare get stew on these atlases,” Millard warned us. “The official  penalty for damaging a book is thirty years’ imprisonment—plus a hefty repair fee.”

“Oops,” Hugh said under his breath, surreptitiously wiping at a page with his shirt.

“Don’t you worry,” Hugh said to Noor. “We’ll find her.”

And he patted her on the back.

“The grimbear blood-sport ring got shut down after the wights were defeated, thank the  birds,” said Hugh, though I noticed Emma’s and Horace’s faces tighten at the word defeated.

It had a false ring now.

Then we all went upstairs. I put on the new clothes and boots I’d gotten the day before  and said goodbye to everyone. My friends filed past me in the hall, wishing me luck and  whispering advice: “Give ’em hell, Jacob,” said Hugh; “Watch your back!” worried Horace;  “Do what Miss Peregrine tells you,” said Claire. I pretended to be unafraid, but something icy  was building in the pit of my stomach.

“Not exactly,” Miss Peregrine replied. “But I’ll never be far away. Oh—and I want you  to bring Hugh along.”

Enoch cocked his head. “That’s a bit random.”

“Can he be here in half an hour?” I said, glancing at a wall clock.

“Should be here any minute,” said Miss Peregrine. “I sent for him some time ago.”

And just then Hugh walked into the building, escorted by Ulysses Critchley, and waved to us,

grinning, from across the ticket hall.

“Why Hugh?” Enoch said under his breath. “If you thought we needed backup, why not  —I dunno—Bronwyn?”

“Because he is capable and selfless,” said Miss Peregrine. “And frankly, he needs a bit  of adventure to take his mind off Fiona.”

I couldn’t argue with that. The poor guy spent every unoccupied moment worrying  himself to death.

“I brought some gifties,” said Hugh, digging into a small bag in his lap. We’d only been  riding the bus for a few minutes and Enoch was already asleep, but now he roused himself.  Emma and I leaned over our seats to look across the aisle. “When everyone found out I was  coming, they gave me things to bring to you. Claire packed us stew-meat sandwiches.” He  pulled out several, wrapped in brown paper, and distributed them. “Spare underwear and  socks, courtesy of Bronwyn. Oh, this is good—two peculiar sheep’s wool sweaters from  Horace.”

“Yes!” said Enoch. “I was wondering what became of those.”

“They got a bit moth-eaten, but Horace has been repairing them in his spare time.”

“They can stop bullets, but not moths?” Emma said.

“Devil’s Acre moths can eat through metal,” Hugh explained.

“And flesh, I hear,” said Enoch. “Wonderful species.”

Hugh held up a dog-eared book. “Olive’s copy of Peculiar Planet: North America.” He  shook it and a map fell out from between the pages. “And Millard tucked in a recent map of  American loops.”

“And this one’s for you,” he said, and handed me a small box.

“Who from?” I asked.

He winked. “Guess.”

There was a note on the top of it written in a neat, looping hand. It read:  The sunset you missed.

I opened it. A stream of amber light floated up and out of it, glistening and sparkling like  dust motes caught in a sunbeam. They circled around me so that it was all I could see for a  moment, before fading away. I was left with a pleasant tingling in my face.

“Wow,” said Hugh. “That was beautiful.”

I squeezed into Enoch and Hugh’s seat and we opened it across our laps, and pretty soon  we were absorbed in the strangeness of it.

“What kind of bizarre country is this?” asked Hugh.

“One without ymbrynes,” said Enoch.

“You’re assuming they need to keep her alive,” Hugh said.

“They went to a lot of trouble to snatch her,” said Enoch. “I’m sure their intention  wasn’t just to let her wither into a pile of dusty bones.”

We rolled on. The sun began to sink. Enoch and Hugh joked around, messing with the  other passengers using one of Hugh’s bees. I could tell Enoch was doing his best to keep  Hugh’s spirits up, and it made me like Enoch a little more. He was sweet-natured despite his best efforts to be a jerk all the time.

Her hands were knotted in her lap and she looked tense. She checked over her shoulder  to make sure Enoch and Hugh weren’t listening to us. When she saw they were sleeping, she  spoke.

We went into the station, which had a small, all-night food court. Enoch and Hugh got  some rubbery hot dogs. Emma had a bean-and-cheese burrito. They were all aging day by day  now—teenagers in growing teenage bodies for the first time in almost a century—and they  were always hungry. But my stomach was in knots, and the thought of eating made me  nauseous. It was odd, I thought, how sometimes my friends seemed ancient, but at other times.

“Could that be the same bus?” Hugh said. “The one they were on?”

“We’d better find out,” I said.

“Someone get help!” Emma shouted, and Hugh took off running, back toward the  EMTs.

“We gave her an emergency serum to slow the worst of her aging, but she may still  succumb to it. Where is Hugh?”

“He went to get help,” Emma said. “Hasn’t come back.”

A look of worry flashed across the ymbryne’s face.

We ran to find Hugh and spotted him by the wrecked bus, which was crumpled and  lying on its side surrounded by flares and police tape. The police who had been standing  guard over the accident had left to investigate the helicopter, so for the moment, no one was  there to stop us from running right up to the bus’s exposed undercarriage.

As we approached, I saw that the tires were blown. The axles, broken. Hugh was  standing beside one, pulling at what looked like a rope. Ropes had tangled around the axles,  clogged up the wheel wells.

“Ellery said something about ropes,” Emma said as we ran toward Hugh. “She said there  was another girl, and she used ropes to stop the bus—”

“You were right,” I said to Miss Peregrine. “There was a second person. A girl.”

But when we got closer, we saw that what Hugh was holding wasn’t a rope at all. It was  a vine.

Vines were wrapped around the axles, around the wheels.

“What on earth . . . ,” Emma said, picking one up. It was green and thorned, and here  and there it had delicate purple flowers.

“Ellery also said something about flowers,” I said. “That the girl gave her flowers.”

Enoch picked one off the vine. “I recognize this . . . They used to grow all around our  house on Cairnholm . . .”

Hugh still hadn’t said anything. He took the flower from Enoch and held it up in the  garish, dancing light of a flare.

“Miss?” he said, a haunted look stealing over his boyish features. “This is a dog rose.”

Miss Peregrine turned to him. Locked eyes and nodded seriously. “Yes, Hugh.”

I said, “I don’t understand.” But the others all seemed to.

“It was Fiona’s flower,” Emma said quietly. “She could grow them even without  meaning to. Sometimes they’d sprout behind her as she walked.”

I felt the air thin, my head go light. “Are you saying . . . ?”

Enoch looked at the vines. “Only Fee could have done something like this.”

“Oh my God,” Hugh cried, tears streaming down his cheeks. “She’s alive.”  Emma wrapped him in a hug, and he leaned into her. He was overjoyed and devastated  all at once. “They have her. They have her. Oh my love. Oh my God.”

“We’ll get her back, Hugh,” Miss Peregrine said. “Don’t doubt it for a second.”

Hugh, I realized, was nearing hysteria. Emma and Enoch were trying to keep him calm,  but he still seemed too stunned to be reasoned with. Worse: He was crying again. I stood up  and started toward him, but Emma pulled him close, curving their bodies together as she  whispered anxiously in his ear. I took another step forward and she stopped me with a single  look—narrowing her eyes at me over his shoulder. Let me handle this, she mouthed.

Emma nodded distractedly, she and Enoch both too focused on their own task—calming  Hugh—to question my strange behavior. So I walked. Not too far to be irresponsible, but just  far enough to clear the voice from my head, and to convince myself of my own lies: that this  was nothing. That I’d heard nothing.

Hugh was having a meltdown. Despite Emma’s and Enoch’s best efforts, he was doing  worse.

“They’ve got Fiona right now,” he was saying through his headset mic for all to hear,  “and the longer we take, the harder it will be to get her back. We need to search every loop  within two—no, three hundred miles of here. And we’ve got to do it now—”

Emma put a hand on his arm. “Hugh, that just won’t work—”

“Sure it will! We’ve got a helicopter!”

LaMothe turned around and glared. “This is my helicopter, boy, and the only place it’s  going is the nearest loop, so we can save this girl’s life.” His glare shifted to Miss Peregrine.  “Get your ward under control.”

“Please, Hugh, you must calm down,” Miss Peregrine said. “We need to choose our next  move very carefully. We’re all upset about this. We’re all worried about Miss Frauenfeld. But  this critical moment is the worst time to flail about blindly with no plan.”

“Fiona’s loop-bound, too,” Hugh muttered. “She’ll age forward, too.”

“Oh God,” Emma said, going a bit pale. “I forgot.”

I had forgotten, too. Because Fiona wasn’t at the Library of Souls with us when it  collapsed, she hadn’t had her internal clock reset like the others. Which meant she could age  forward.

“It’s likely they took Fiona prisoner after Miss Wren’s loop collapse, months and  months ago,”  Miss Peregrine said. “She was seen leaping from the cliff’s edge. We can only  surmise that she survived the fall and was collected from the woods below.”

Hugh’s eyes fell shut as he imagined it. “What have they been doing with her? And what  do they want with her?”

“We don’t yet know,” said Miss Peregrine, “but you can be sure they didn’t keep her  alive all this time just to let her age forward in the middle of”—Miss Peregrine glanced out  the window—“Iowa.”

“Yeah,” Hugh said miserably. “I suppose.”

“After we make this one stop,” Miss Peregrine said, “we’ll return to Devil’s Acre, gather  all our people and intelligence, and make a proper plan. And we will get her back.”

He nodded. “If you say so, miss.”

Hugh was a bundle of nervous energy. He was struggling to keep his freak-out  contained, and it was making a vein on his temple throb. I couldn’t blame him. The love of his  life was in the hands of Caul’s most notorious lieutenants, and God knew what was happening —or had happened already—to her.

But there was nothing any of us could do about it right then, so I looked around the  bleak little town for something that might distract him.

“And we’re not staying long,” Hugh added pointedly, and then his eyebrow shot up.  “Unless . . . you didn’t happen to see four men come through here with a girl earlier today, did  you?”

“Nope. Nobody’s come through in months.”

Hugh’s face fell.

I met eyes with Emma and nodded at Hugh, and she got the message.

“Yeah, let’s meet him,” she said, hooking her arm around Hugh’s.

“Twenty-three skidoo!” the girl yipped.

Hugh came reluctantly, and we all walked over to the little house while Elsie talked a  mile a minute. “It’s been slow, slow, slow lately, nobody around at all. Just some salesman and  the loop keeper. Teacher’s supposed to come and give me lessons soon. Other than that, it’s  awful boring here. Where do you come from?”

“That’s okay, I still want to see it. What time are you from? I mean, when were you  born?”

“You ask a lot of questions,” Hugh said.

“Good Lord,” said Hugh. “He’ll be roasted alive!”

“Don’t touch him,” Elsie warned. “You’ll get frostbite. He’s got a temperature of minus  fifty.”

Hugh and Enoch said quick goodbyes and ran after Miss Peregrine.

Elsie looked at me, pleading. “Ain’t there something you can do? You know fancy  people . . .”

The rest of us didn’t talk much. Enoch fell asleep. Emma talked quietly with Hugh for  most of the ride, massaging his balled fists back into open hands.

Since Ellery and LaMothe’s bodyguards weren’t along for this ride, Miss Wren and Miss Cuckoo had the space to stay in human form, and they talked low and serious with Miss Peregrine for most of the trip. I hoped they were hatching ideas about where the wights had taken Fiona—for Fiona’s sake and for Hugh’s—but I couldn’t be sure. Before all this had happened, Hugh had

actually begun to have moments of peace and fun and levity, but now the wound had been ripped open again, and it was twice as wide. I knew him well enough to know he wouldn’t rest until she was back among us and safe again, and that if, bird forbid, something happened to her, it would absolutely kill him.

I shoved that thought away, and in its place a question popped into my head that I’d  been dying to ask Miss Peregrine. I couldn’t do it over the headset mic, though. It wasn’t  something I wanted LaMothe to hear.

He seemed to be asleep, his bald head smooshed against the window, but still.

I couldn’t wait, either.

“I have to know something.” I leaned over her seat, whispering, and she turned away  from the other ymbrynes. “Back in Marrowbone, in the camp, when you found the start of the  hollowgast’s trail? It wasn’t just the boot print, was it?”

Miss Peregrine shook her head. “No.”

Hugh was listening intently now.

“I found this outside the tent, amongst the trees.” And she drew from her blouse a  pressed purple flower. A dog rose.

Hugh reached out and touched it, turned it over in his hand. “She was there?”

“Yes. And the wights never were.” Miss Peregrine got so quiet I was half reading her  lips. “It was Fiona who brought the girl to the hollowgast, which had hidden itself a safe  distance from the Northern clan’s camp, waiting.”

“I don’t understand.” Hugh’s brow was scrunched, his eyes darting around. “She was  helping them?”

“Not willingly. I’ve been conferring with Misses Wren and Cuckoo about this, and we  believe she was—and likely still is—mind controlled. The bus accident was the result of a  lapse in that control. Fiona tried to escape. Perhaps even to kill her captors.”

Emma gasped. Hugh said nothing; his jaw was clenched so tight I feared for his teeth.

“Damn, they probably want to kill her,” Enoch muttered, then clapped a hand over his  mouth. Emma shot him a poisonous look.

“No,” Miss Peregrine said. “The wights are too focused, too practical. They’ve kept her  alive, and gone to all the trouble of bringing her here from Wales, for a reason. Whatever that  reason is, it’s not yet been fulfilled. They won’t kill her.”

“Not yet,” Hugh said. “Not until they’re done with her.”

I turned around to look for Hugh. He was still by the elevators, in serious conversation  with Miss Blackbird and Miss Peregrine.

“I don’t understand why Miss Peregrine insisted he come with us,” Enoch said, “when  she knew that if we did find Fiona she could be in dire shape. Mind controlled at the very  least. Maybe even—” He stopped himself before saying it. Dead. “That would’ve crushed  him flat.”

“My goodness, Enoch,” said Horace, “have you grown a heart?”

Enoch glowered at him. “Seems a bit cruel, that’s all.”

“No,” Emma said firmly. “Leaving him out of it wouldn’t have been doing Hugh any  favors. If we’d found Fiona without him, and he ever found out Miss Peregrine knew we were  on her trail, that would have crushed him,” said Emma. “He deserved to be there, no matter  what.”

“How’s he holding up?” Noor asked.

“As well as can be expected,” said Emma. “He’s a strong kid. But he’s angry, and he’s  worried.”

I was dying to hear the others’news, especially after Horace had teased us, but he and Noor made us tell them all about what we’d seen and done first. Emma, Enoch, and I took turns telling it while Hugh brooded at the end of the table, nursing a pint of cloudy ale. The camp, the accident, Ellery and her torn-out worm, Brother Ted and his stolen sparkstone. When we’d finished, it struck me how many odd things coalesced around a single question: What did the wights want?

“And what any of this has to do with Fiona?” Hugh growled.

Millard cleared his throat. “Yes—so. Everyone’s always said it’s impossible to escape a collapsed loop. All the experts who’ve studied it agree: Either it kills you, turns you into a hollowgast while flattening everything for hundreds of miles—as happened at the Tunguska Event of 1908—or, if you’ve just happened to imbue yourself with the soul of one of the most powerful ancient ones, as Caul did just before we collapsed the Library of Souls, then you’re trapped forever in phenomenon we call esoteric sequestration—”

“Or find Fiona?” Hugh said. He seemed ready to tear his hair out.

Miss Peregrine had seemed oddly calm through all this, and now she glided across the floor to Nim and laid her hands gently upon his shoulders. He flinched.

Hugh’s face fell into his hands.

“Harvested fresh,” Millard said. “Which must be why they’re keeping her alive—”

“Millard, please,” Miss Peregrine hissed. “I’m sorry, Hugh—”

“Go on, keep reading,” he said. He uncovered his face, eyes red. Bronwyn wrapped an arm tight around him, and kept it there.

“And Fiona’s,” said Hugh, “and she’s on the list, too.”

“And you’re Caul’s sister,” Millard pointed out. “His actual flesh and blood. It makes a terrible kind of sense that he’d need part of you to come back.”

I waited for her to argue. For her to tell Millard how mistaken he was. But she was quiet. Her eyes searched a blank wall. Then she said, “Yes. Yes, I suppose that does make sense.”

There was a long, heavy moment, when it felt like we were slipping over the edge. Giving up, giving in to fear.

And then Hugh spoke.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’ll never let them take you.”

And there was such iron in his voice, such unpanicked firmness, that it seemed to pull the rest of us back from the brink.

“And get Fiona back,” said Bronwyn.

“And decorate Devil’s Acre with their heads!” cried Hugh, and a cheer went up.

For the first time in days, I saw him crack a wavering smile.

Millard rushed off to the mapping archive to search American loop atlases for any mention of the Well of Hope. Horace, for whom sleep and work were often the same thing, actually did go back to the house to rest—his plan was to down a dram of “sleeping solution” and put himself into a trancelike slumber, where he hoped to dream the answer we needed. Hugh had been muttering darkly about interrogating the wights who were still imprisoned—“They know something,” he’d said—and threatened to “sting it out of ’em if they won’t talk.” But cooler heads prevailed, arguing that not only would that break a number of ymbryne code laws, but revealing anything about what we knew to wights, even jailed ones, could jeopardize everything.

I was about to start arguing with him when Olive pointed out that Hugh and Enoch were gone. We spun around to look, and she was right.

Emma was so mad she nearly lit her own shirtsleeve aflame. “I know just where they went,” she growled. “Come on, Bronwyn, let’s stop them before they do something monumentally stupid.”

Which left Noor, Olive, and me to our own devices. It was clear we weren’t getting into Marrowbone, and anyway, two ymbrynes were more than capable of getting information out of the Americans (if there was any to be gotten). We spent an hour wandering the Acre, feeling helpless.

We were so close, and yet . . .

Eventually, we all found our way back to the house. Nobody had come up with anything useful. Millard hadn’t found anything in the ymbrynes’ collection of American loop maps— and he was abundantly familiar with them now, after days of combing them for V’s loop. Horace, despite his best efforts to force a revelation, had, much to his embarrassment, only dreamed of pizza. No one else had anything to show for their efforts, and Miss Peregrine hadn’t returned.

We were a sad group.

I took in my friends’ gaunt faces—Hugh’s devastation, Emma’s exhaustion, Noor’s anxiety, even Enoch’s lethargy—and I made a decision.

“Nor I,” said Olive, yawning, too.

“I do,” Hugh said, his shoulders straightening. “I understand you clearly, Jacob, and I’m inclined to agree with you.”

Only when the littlest ones were safely off to bed did the others turn to face me. Enoch, Bronwyn, Emma, Horace, Hugh, Noor. Millard. Six pairs of eyes blinking at me. A seventh pair, invisible.

“All right then,” I said. “Who wants to help me break into the Marrowbone loop?”

Six hands shot up into the air. “My hand is raised, too!” Millard said.

“We’re not far now,” Hugh said quietly. I heard the buzz of his bees, who were helping guide us in the darkness. “We turn left at the lamp, and it should be just up the street from there.”

Millard said, “Nearly there!”

Hugh—no, Horace—screamed.

And Emma caught fire.

“Don’t you pay him any mind, Horace,” Hugh said. “Go on.”

“But, miss,” Hugh tried, “do you—Was there any news?”

A beat of silence. “Yes.”

Hugh banged his hand on a table suddenly. “We’ve got to raise an army and storm this place! Come in with guns blazing!”

“Not so fast,” said Miss Peregrine. “I understand passions are running high, but we don’t know what we’ll find in this loop. Whether or not the wights have been there already. What kind of peculiars we’ll be dealing with. We need to tread carefully—but prepare ourselves for a conflict.”

“Are you serious?” Bronwyn said. “We’d have gone even if you forbade it.”

“And chained us in a dungeon,” added Hugh.

“I know,” Miss Peregrine said proudly. “Well, we have a great deal ahead of us, don’t we?”

“Let’s go murder some wights!” Hugh shouted, and the room exploded into cheers.

“Yes, yes, but first—sleep.” Miss Peregrine stood up. “Off to bed, children. And don’t forget to brush your teeth.”

Our reunion was joyful but short, and somewhat overshadowed by the horrifying scene of bodies strewn across the street, which I quickly explained. The ymbrynes had spent a long time trying to break through the sealed loop entrance, which was on lockdown after the wights invaded, and only allowed Noor and me inside by some fluke. After an hour, Miss Peregrine and Miss Wren had been about to give up and fly off to fetch some other, more extreme method of breaking and entering, when the door opened on its own. The waiting had left my friends frazzled with worry and frustration, and Hugh shaking with anger. Everyone was furious with the deadrisers—but at the moment there were more important things to deal with.

Like the wights on the hill. Yes, they were up there. The presence of hollows had confirmed that for me, even before the deadrisers had told us their story. Yes, the wights were here for the skull on Bentham’s list, and given that they’d been searching Gravehill for it since the previous night, they were probably not far from finding it. Each new bit of bad news made my friends’ faces constrict a bit tighter.

“Did they have a girl with them when they came in?” Hugh asked Lyle, making a concerted effort not to attack the boy, and he described her.

“I saw a girl like that,” said Eugenia. “They had her in leg irons.”

Hugh’s face went stony, and Bronwyn had to physically restrain him from running toward the hill that very moment.

We stood in the deadrisers’grassy yard by a low white fence, beside the massacre, planning what might easily become another one. We would ascend the hill together, staying hidden for as long as we could, and try to be ready for anything. For days, Hugh had quietly been amassing new bees, and his stomach hummed audibly with them. Emma had preheated her hands; when she held them out they rippled the air. Claire had sharpened the teeth in her backmouth, and gnashed them in the air by way of demonstration. Enoch had stuffed a backpack full of pickled hearts and had already begun installing them in the chewed and fallen dead—“I can fix more of ’em,” he said to Josep, “if you’ve got some spare parts handy.”

“Remember, the wights favor guns,” Miss Cuckoo said. “It’s best not to run directly at them, unless you’re quite close.”

“And Hugh . . . ,” Miss Peregrine said, delicately, pressing the palms of her hands together. “Should we encounter Fiona, please remember that she may still be under their control. So approach her with caution.”

He shook his head slowly, looking away. Then said, almost too quietly to hear, “All right.”

“We need to get to the top of that hill,” said Hugh. He had begun to channel his anger into laserlike focus. “Battle strategy one-oh-one: Never engage the enemy from lower ground. They’ll have all the advantage.”

Our group was me, Noor, Hugh, and Bronwyn, and the other was Horace, Millard, Emma, Enoch, and Claire. I instructed my hollow to trail us at a distance, far enough to the rear that if it fell or grunted or crunched leaves too loudly, the noise wouldn’t give away our position. Enoch left his battalion of limping dead behind in the woods. “A second attack wave if we need one,” he called them, and someone had snickered. Millard, who had shed his clothes, would act as a messenger between the two groups, if one was required, and Olive had let Miss Peregrine badger her into staying behind with her and Miss Cuckoo and Josep. Miss Peregrine would not be going with us. Before we left, she gathered us for a quick goodbye.

I apologized, then told them what I’d seen. The message Millard had passed along. And then I looked around and said, “Where’s Hugh?”

Noor and Bronwyn spun.

“He was just here!” Bronwyn said.

But he wasn’t here anymore.

“Oh my God,” said Noor, pointing to something on the ground, ten feet away. “Look.”

It was a trail of purple flowers meandering away among the headstones.

Oh, Hugh. You idiot.

We ran, following the trail of flowers, not even bothering to hide behind the graves now. The vine wound around a monument to Civil War soldiers, past a tomb decorated with empty flower vases, to a circle of graves.

There in the middle of it all stood Fiona, in a flowing white gown, ringed by deep beds of purple flowering vines. She was facing away from us, and Hugh was approaching her carefully from behind, repeating her name, his hand outstretched.

“Hugh!” Bronwyn shouted. “Don’t!”

Fiona turned around. Her eyes were rolled back in her head. Hugh stopped moving forward for some reason. He looked down and then back at Fiona again, and I heard him say, “Sweetheart, no . . .”

And then something wrapped around my ankles, and I lost my balance and fell, and Noor and Bronwyn fell beside me. The carpet of vines beneath our feet had come to life, and was quickly swaddling us, mummifying us so that we could hardly move a muscle. We struggled to free ourselves, but within a few seconds we were completely immobilized.

Helpless.

And then I felt its approach: the second hollowgast.

I grunted a warning to my friends just as it appeared above us on the hill—and then called out for my hollow, the giant one I had tamed earlier.

Emma and the others would have to do without its protection for a little while.

“Fiona!” Hugh shouted. “Please, love, don’t do this!”

The vines around us tightened.

There was a loud buzzing sound, and everyone looked to Hugh. His mouth was open, and bees were starting to pour out.

Murnau shouted something at the man with the ruined face. The man with the ruined face then shouted something at Fiona. Fiona jerked, and a rope of vines clasped around Hugh’s mouth.

His eyes widened pitifully. “Mmmmf!” Just a few bees had escaped. The skinny wight slapped at the air and killed one.

The vines were slackening—but slowly. It was enough to get an arm free now, and one leg. And for Hugh to loose his bees. They streamed into the air and began to find their targets —the wights, the hollow.

The hollow turned. The addict was yelling at Fiona, the light from his eyes smoking, the skin around them melting—and everywhere the vines were moving like nests of snakes. The girls and Hugh were struggling against the vines, which were constricting tighter and tighter around them.

“Let him go!” Miss Peregrine shouted after me. “Take the others and get to safety!”

We surrounded Fiona. Hugh scooped her into his arms and she fell limply across him. He would accept no help and carried her by himself, his face rigid but streaming with tears.

Hugh had not let her go for a moment since the vines had released him, but he was finally persuaded to let the ymbrynes examine her. We all circled around anxiously to watch. The ymbrynes spoke softly to her. Asked her questions. She seemed dazed, but no longer hypnotized. Her eyes were normal, if red-rimmed and bloodshot, and there were bruises purpling on her arms and face.

“Are those from the bus accident?” Miss Peregrine asked her.

She nodded.

“Did they hurt you in any other way?”

She blinked several times, then looked away.

“Love?” said Hugh, grasping her hand. “Did they hurt you?”

She closed her eyes.

“Please talk to me,” he begged her. “Tell me what they did to you.”

She opened her eyes again. Looked at him, and slowly nodded her head. Then she opened her mouth. Blood spilled out. It ran down her chin onto her white dress.

We brought Fiona back to Devil’s Acre and straight to Rafael the bone-mender to begin her recovery. Hugh never left her side. Neither did the rest of us. We crowded her room, talking to her, telling her stories about all she’d missed, and just hanging out in the hope it might make her feel like she was home again, even though the home she’d left behind—Miss Peregrine’s—was gone forever.


End file.
